Nickeluli

Finally it has been revealed, I’ve been waiting so long for this cell-phone. I was planing to buy the first version of the Iphone but since it didn’t support 3G I skipped it, instead I bought a Sony Ericsson K850i. I haven’t been that satisfied with that phone, I wanted to take good pictures and have it syncing with my Outlook. I can’t say that it does any of these things very well, so I really hoping that the Iphone 3G will be the new next thing.

One of the new cool things are the built in GPS that’s beutifully integrated with Google maps. I also read that it will support syncing with Outlook, both calender and mails. I wonder if I should prebok it right now, or wait and see what the first customers things about it.

Anyone want to buy my old Sony Ericsson K850i with 5 Mp camera?

Today I took a new step in the working model we have at Testfreaks. As I’ve written before we have a lot of our staff sitting in countries and time zones all over the world. Lately I’ve had too much work to do, and I’ve wanted an assistant for quite some time. Until two weeks ago I’ve been thinking of hiring an assistant here at the office. But that wouldn’t suite our need for availability 24/7, and since most of our programmers are situated in other time zones it would be great with an assistant in another time zone then me that could bridge my work when I’m home sleeping.

I’ve been thinking and drawing a lot on paper on an outsourced way to clone my self, and now I got found the solutions. Some of my programmers have been working with me for more then one year. And today I made the best one team manager of the rest of the team. Our team has grown a lot and is now more then 20 people in 9 different time zones.

It’s an odd feeling of knowing that you could scale your organisation a lot more, but you - yourself are the bottle neck. That’s basically how my work situation have looked like the last couple of month, but from now I will have a lot more time to improve Testfreaks and work more strategic. The business model we have chosen for this project is very interesting and I don’t know of any other big online company that work like us, but please give me a comment if you know of any companies working like this.

Hi everyone, or anyone?

I’m not sure how many actually reads this blog, I guess I should add some google analytics to it to find out. I’ve been looking at some different web shop software, I would really like to find a good open source developed web shop to set up. I’ve found some interesting things about Magento in a swedish forum when I was scanning the net for this. I haven’t done anything else then installed it locally on my laptop that runs Ubuntu. And it seems to work without any fixing at all. That’s really good.

I will get back to you on this. My idéea is to set up some web shops just to see how many customers that are willing to purchase things from it. Everyday at work I get mails from Chinese companies that want to sell me things, and I have good connections in Yanti, China to ship things for Sweden. So my thoughts was to setup one shop in osCommerce and one in Magento to see what shop is best.

I’ll get back with the results.

One big part of my work is research, since I always need to know how much review sites, and manufacturer that are represented on a market before we enter it. Much of this research (95%) is done by online market researchers. I always try to find local people living in the country, it’s always easier because they often know of these sites before we start the research.

I found it to be very important that the researcher have an interest in the area that they are doing the research. Two weeks ago I gave the exact same project to two researchers, just to see the difference. The result got me to question all my previous research projects. I wanted them to find me as many good review sites as possible in a big Asian country, not China. I told them I didn’t want forum, blogs or any spam sites (MFA).

Person1, lives in US but have language knowledge of the specific country and have a strong interest in all sorts of gadgets, came back with a list of more then 100 review sites.

Person2, lives in India and have worked with online research for four years and and have language knowledge of the specific country, came back with a list of 15 sites and told me there was not possible to find any more sites. And he had been working for a really long time.

I can also tell you that the cost of the research had big difference, person1 cost 150$, person2 cost me 50$. One of the reasons for person1 cost me more is that he’s located in US, but that was something I knew from the start. I just wanted to compare a online researcher from India with a research from US.

When I told person2, that I already had found more then 100 review sites in the country he wanted to try again, and a few days later he sent me a list with all the 100 first sites he had found in Google, mostly crap sites. It was e-commerce sites (without reviews), forum, blogs and other sites that I had no use of at all. I told him to seek work in another work segment. I told him that he had made a bad and sloppy research. Then he told me that I was a very bad buyer that didn’t understood the quality of my work, and then he told me that Americans where much better buyers and never distrusted his research.

At the moment I have 10 projects for market research running in countries all over the world, and I’ve stopped using the cheapest one. On all these projects there where a lot of Indian firms and freelancers bidding on them. But as always I raise a warning for these firms and people, make sure they really have the language skills that are needed and ask them for some kind of examples of research in the specific country.

Good luck with all your online research

I’ve been working with freelancers from all the world for the last 18 month. It’s an easy way to get things done fast. You post your assignments, and then workers may bid on your project. Is not always the cheapest one that are the best, make sure you read the reviews. If a freelancer don’t have reviews from other customers then ask them for work samples so you can decide if they good or not.

After 18 month I can say that we are at the moment experience enormous inflation in the internet economy. The hour rate for a freelancer have raised over 150% in the last year. The amount of people working as freelancers have also increased. China is the country where the prices have increased the most, more then 200% on a year. This is due to Chinese language skills are hard to find and many companies need to translate there sites and texts to Chinese. There is also a problem with more new buyers that don’t really know how much to pay there freelancers per hour.

A majority of all freelancers are situated in India. But I wouldn’t recommend them, hire a Philippine or a Chinese instead. Philippines and Chinese can think for them self, Indian freelancers are so afraid of making wrong so they will end up asking you about everything and that takes a lot of time. Most of the communication is done through different IM softwares (like gtalk, msn, icq, skype, yahoo im).

Today oDesk released an interesting service, where they have based on there freelancers average rate and location have aggregated country specific price maps in google maps. Unfortunately this map will only raise the salaries more, because they aren’t reflecting the reality. I’ve been trying a lot of different sites to find good and competent people, and oDesk is not the cheapest, see list below.

According to oDesk you will have to pay 14$ per hour for a freelancer in India, this is not true. Maybe on oDesk, but if you go to other sites on the net you will find that the rates are often negotiable. If “Bevarn” from India have listed his hourly rate to 15$, you can always talk him down to a much lower salary. But don’t go to low, it should be a win-win situation. You should always pay what you think is fare, there’s no point in forcing people in to slavery.

So for the list of places to buy good services to good prices.

Getafreelancer.com
This is by far the biggest and best site to find good people, most people are situated in India, Pakistan, Philippines and China. Lately unfortunately, I’veca noticed an increase of “gold-diggers” on this site. What I mean is people that have heard they can make good money and promise a lot, but don’t really know anything and can’t deliver.

Getacoder.com
Not that big, seems to be a lot of fictive bids (bids made to look like the site are more active and bigger then it really is). The same people here as you can find on GAF (getafreelancer).

oDesk.com
Big site, good features, lot of people. Here you have an even wider spread of people from all over the world. But regarding the prices and hourly rates shown in the image above it’s not that good.

guru.com
Big American site, here you will find many American working for salaries often far higher then Europe. This is probably a good place to find staff in US, that you want to hire for shorter assignments. There are freelancers from China and India here as well, but they are to expensive to work with.

I know I’ve only mentioned some of the sites, last time I looked (in September) there where more then 100 sites for freelancers. But I can really recommend it, it works fine. But beware of Indians promising more then they can deliver. I work with three Indians and it works well, so of course there exist good ones as well.

According to Resume, a newspaper in Sweden, the community is for sale. Lunarstorm is the biggest online community in Sweden, with 1.2 million members, and around 1.1 million unique visitors per week. The users middle age is 18.3 according to Wikipedia.

Lunarstorm was sold for 170 million swedish krones, around 26 million dollar, in the end of 2006. It was acquired by Sven Mörtstedt, a swedish businessman that made his money in real estate.

The question is who will buy it? There are a couple of swedish companies that might be interested in acquiring the community that have had big problems with the international competition from Facebook and Myspace. MTG, Bonnier and Norwegian owned Schibstedt might be possible buyers.

I don’t really watch that much tv online, but I like the thought. So far I’ve just seen Revision3 shows, but today I looked at Natali del Conte’s new show on Cnet. I liked the concept - quick, informatively and good looking host. Normally it’s not that important how the host of the show looks, but this one I liked I hope that the tv blends more with internet so we soon can see these shows in front of the tv instead of the computer.

Natali del conte, went from TechCrunch to hosting the podshow Textra and then to Cnet. Quite a good career leap. Anyway I hope to see more of her shows, and that they are in the same way as this.

Here is actually an old version of her previous show Textra

I finally got it to work. Actually it wasn’t that hard. Once I knew what to look for

So basically for all people how follow my microbloging at Jaiku, now you can also see my posts from this blog.

I found a good description on how-to use Jaiku with Wordpress written by RickMeasham

Today I launched new categories in several of our sites, we also added Pixmania prices as a complement to shopping.com in UK market.

At the moment there’s a total of 13 viable categories on testfreaks.com, and the new ones from today are in the US.

Xbox360 games
Playstation3 games

In germany we launched

Xbox360 spiele
Playstation3 spiele
Heimkinosystem
Monitore

And in russia we launched

Игры на Playstation3
Игры на XBox360

Next up in US is GPS Navigation, multifunctional printers and more gaming categories. In Sweden we are working hard in gathering new gaming sources so we can launch this here as well. A funny thing hit me, most of the swedish gaming sites have english names.

For those who are more interested in my work, can follow my micro-blogging on Jaiku.

Last weeks I’ve been working with the quality on Testfreaks concerning new products and future categories. And a thing that hit me is the problem with product names and different markets. Since Testfreaks will be launched on several markets we need to keep track on product names on different markets. Same product but different names, and we need to know of this. By giving the product several names in our system we are making this possible, but still - why make this so complicated? Why can’t manufacturer just keep one name on the products.

Another thing that struck me is the lack of good images on products. The big manufacturer like Sony, Pioneer and JVC for examples are good. But most of them are really crap at giving good images on there products. This is particularly a problem with older products, the only good images out there are 100 x 100 this is not worth showing. Do anyone know of any good site with really good product images?

Internet makes the shopping more difficult since you can’t actually touch a product, instead we look at images and read good reviews. So if the manufacturer don’t provide good images, are we just going to skip buying there products? It’s a big focus on new products but there’s also a big secondhand market with consumer electronics, and they are also in need of good images.

And please, all manufacturer that use flash, remove all flash from your pages, since this is impossible to crawl in a good way and the site is much harder to navigate etc. Not to mention extract images from.