Yoomba is a new peer-to-peer service that lets everyone with a mail adress make a VOIP call or chat with others just like MSN, ICQ, Yahoo IM, Gtalk etc. The diffrence is that you don’t have to be sure the other part have Yoomba installed, the service adds a button on your mailservice so you can call or chat with anyone on your contact list.
A lot of people on the web is complaining on spam methods to get new users to the service.
Read more at Yoomba.com
The growth and number of visitors to the social network sites in Sweden are dropping by as much as 25% for the biggest site Lunarstorm. According to IDG.se, a big news network in Sweden, all the big communities have problems and facing big competition from the big american competitors. The last couple of month Facebook and Myspace have taken a lot of the Swedes interest instead.
Last year a several of the big media companies in Sweden bought them self a Social network, to get an advertising channel to the younger swedes. Maybe this wasn’t such a good investment after all, I guess time will tell.
If I look at my friends, all have left the Swedish communities for Facebook. Another up and coming network in Sweden right now is Linkedin, they have the last three or four month grown rapidly in Sweden and most of the people working in IT and marketing can now be found there, at least if you work in any of the three big cities in Sweden.
I’ve been totally Spotified, the last couple of days. Actually we have had a beta account at work for this great service a couple of weeks now, and it’s really good.
The service is based on streaming, so you never actually download anything. You might say it’s a legal Napster, but without the viruses and quality. This will probably be a big competitor to last.fm, pandora and other similar services. It’s got a hugh library with songs in all genre. I did a search for the swedish band “Lillasyster” former Luuk, but there where no songs listed from them. But all my other searches have popuped up instantly, very fast. It doesn’t feel like it’s web based. Hopefully they get the randomize function or should I call it radiofunction to work, where you can choose genre or decade (70s, 80s music). This is not working fully at this time.
Last time Felix Hagnö and Martin Lorentzon worked together they created Tradedoubler, this time they will take over the music distribution scen. They have teamed up with Daniel Ek, former CTO at Stardoll.
The really big question is, when will they go public with this really good service?
When building a site like Testfreaks, and have the aim to launch in 30 markets before the end of 2007, you end up with a lot of linguistic problems. To find freelance people that speak english are no problems, russian is also very easy. But to find good people that speak french, spanish, chinese are more difficult - but not impossible. The impossible task is to find Japanese speaking freelancers, they hardly exists. Currently I have found a company in China that provides me with Pythons programmers that know Chinese, but I’ve been looking for them the last 6 month. It think these will get the job done, the company have also promised to deliver more programmers if I want. I also found a guy living in US, that are a native Japanese, that helps me with some quality checking etc. Since I don’t speak all the languages, I have diffrent accessories that make my job easier, but in the end it’s all about trust between you and the freelancer.
Before found this Chinese-japanese company I’ve been in contact with several companies telling me they can deliver what I want. But they never come through with there promises, and this is the big problem with freelancers on the internet. Okey most of the sites you buy there services on are giving you the opportunity to review freelancers and leave feedback but this is still not working as good as it could. A freelancer could easily manipulate this, that’s why you always need to test the freelancer before you give them the job.
Wow, what should I say? I’ve been using Joost since early this year. I got a beta testing account long before the normal user got one, anyway that service is forcing you to download there client. This english service, TV Links, that I found, don’t know how legale it is, give me all good new series on TV from all over the world - mostly US.
The page doesn’t say that much about the company or person behind the site, but who cares? I only want to look at good tv, and this service gives me this possibility without any client download. Take a look at it, it has a really big archive of good series.
My only question is, how long will this service be online until some big content provider decide to sue the site.
Today I’ve been posting some new assignment on two of the big freelance forums I use. I usually use people that I have been working together with before, but because of what we are working with on Testfreaks I can’t use the same freelancers all the time. Today I’ve talked to this really nice older woman (45+, based on here picture on MSN) about researching on the internet. She’s offering her services for 1$/hour, but as always I’m sceptical to older people using internet. I don’t really know why, I guess the young people are more hungry and eager to make money and therefor willing to work faster. The perfect freelancer that I see it, is a student on a university in Russian, Philipiness, Ukraine or China. Argentina is also a very good place to find talented freelancers.
A lot of people that I meet both IRL and online talk about India as the perfect place to outsource resources to. But I don’t agree to that, I’ve only had problems using people from India. Okey, they are really good programmers and so on, but they suck at thinking for them self. If I don’t provide them with the exact details, like a kitchen recipe for cookies, they are unable to perform my task. Why? All the other outsourcing destinations that I work with can think for them self, but the indians working inside big BPO companies can’t make this work.
Anyway, I’ll have to get back to my research. I will write more about outsourcing and freelancers later.
I just stumbled across this site, Mojobaby, while checking my networks questions at Linkedin (Which is a really good site, btw). This site helps you share pictures from your phone with your friends on the internet. Unfortanatly for me it only works in USA, and not in Sweden 
But I think this is a really good way to connect your phone with your internet blogs and social networks. Instant sharing! The first thing that pops in to my mind when reading this is, no more postcards to friends. From now only the parents get the written post cards.
I wonder if this site have any plans on launching outside of US? Radar.net (Currently in beta) are another good site that makes the same.
Could this be something for Flickr?
