Nickeluli

Google is everywhere!

There was a time when people thought Google was the solution for the Microsoft problem… Now I’m not so sure anymore. With the new browser Chrome, Google have soon assemled an entire operating system. They have there own browser, mail, spreedsheet. Will the next thing from Google be a OS?

Google also have there Android plattform for mobile phones, and the first phone is on it’s way out to the market. Would this plattform also work as an OS for computers? One thing is sure with all these data and usage of Google products they practically know everything about you.

Yesterday I first heard news about the new Google browser called Chrome. This morning I downloaded it for testing and after about one hour of testing I’m convinced, I will no longer need Firefox. The only problem so far is that I have a lot of great plugins for Firefox, and I hope these will show up for Chrome as soon as possible. 

The first thing I noticed is speed, both in rendering webpages and in handling the browser. Sites that normally is slow, is much faster in the new browser. And sites that alreday are super fast is even more faster. I also tested some secure locations, and there’s no problem with any thing. 

It seems that Chrome will be a big threath against Mozillas Firefox that for long have been an outstanding and great choose if you don’t want to use Microsofts browser. And I guess that the link Google have put on there first page, will give them a lot of new users of Chrome since people get it servered on a plate rather then have to seek for it. 

Perhaps this it’s time to buy Google stocks once again. Because Google is really everywhere, and will probably continue to dominate the web for years to come.

I’ve been testing the Magento plattform for a while and I must say it’s good - but complicated. I don’t find there menu very logical. But the system is great for an e-commerce entreprenur that can have one CMS for several stores.

I’ve tried to modified the layout of the store and it’s both easy and not easy. If you know your CSS you can basically have one design for each product page. But that also makes it difficult. I find if very hard to make a good overall design, but then again I’m no designer.

Unfortently I don’t have that much time at nights to work on these small projects but I will give you a more detailed report furter on.

Hi, don’t know how many of you that listen to this podcast, TWIT (This week in tech). I’ve followed the podcast for more then 18 month, and I can only say - it’s the best! It gives you a great view of what’s happening in the techworld online.

Sure I follow a lot of others blogs on the subjects as well, but I think Leo Laporte have a long history online and he seems to be very updated on what happends online. The site twit.tv also have live broadcasting with webcam shows for about 40h /week.

Here’s a link to where you can pick up the latest podcast of Twit.

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.

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