As of today I’m working as project manager for Viasat on demand. It’s a VOD service initially focused in the countries where Viasat broadcast TV. We will aggregate free-tv content from all the Viasat channels, inkl TV3, TV6, TV1000 and Viasat Sport. Each month we stream several hundred live sports event on the web, we also have catch-ups from our free-tv platforms.
Found a really funny video about online dating.
So, I’ve started working on one of my new projects this week. I will be a mix between a regular e-commerce site and a lead generating site. Today I’ve been sitting at the office with the designer and made a really good looking layout for the webpage.
Next thing is to get the page coded in perfect CSS/XHTML and thanks to previous work I have good connections for that in South America. Hopefully it will be finished by the time I wake up tomorrow. After that I will start doing the back-end coding in PHP.
I’ve also contacted some potential partners for this project. The project will be two sites, one English for UK and one Swedish. The will have different content but almost the same design.
Since I’m going to sell things on the site but don’t want to handle a large stock of products, I think I will solve this with Drop shipments. That means you don’t have to keep all the products in stock, you have someone else keeping the goods for you. And they ship the products to your customers. One other way that I’ve been talking to friends about would be to link to other e-commerce sites that have affiliate programs. I haven’t decided what way to go yet, but I will before the end of the week.
I will have these two projects up before the end of June.
Where are we going? I got a link over Twitter today from a guy that I’ve been following for a while. I don’t know him, but still I like to follow certain people on Twitter. Some twitter about work, other about their live and some about something else. But thanks to him I saw this great video on Youtube. Check it out it’s about the technical evolution.
I’ve had a Twitter account for about 1.5 years. I also had a Jaiku account that long. I’m not very active on Twitter and even more less active on Jaiku. Since Google a couple a weeks ago announced that they won’t continue developing Jaiku and instead turn it to open source software I’ve started using Twitter again. I must say that Twitter have becomed a lot more mainstream. It seems that more and more people do find their way to the site or system. The other day I was visiting the site for the Grammy Awards this year and I saw the little icon on the web page saying – follow us on Twitter.
In Sweden a competitor called, Bloggy have started up their business and managed to move a lot of the Swedish Jaiku community to Bloggy instead. The guy who funded it is name Jonas Lejon. I don’t really the point in creating yet another one of these sites. Who will win? Twitter haven’t really found a good way to make money on yet. In Japan Twitter are experimenting with this ads (See the Toyota ad below). Perhaps something for Bloggy as well to start with.
So how will these microblogs platforms make money? Why don’t they charge companies for their followers. Say for example that a large company would be on Twitter to communicate with their fans then Twitter could charge them like a buzz marketing company that do Word of mouth marketing. Perhaps this would be something for Bzzagent to use. Does anyone know if they already use a platform like this?
I really need to start posting more things on my blog…
This Monday when I returned to the office after a well needed three weeks vacations in Thailand I had over 400 unread mails in my mailboxes (yes I have more then one). So basically the first day of the week was spent reading through old mails. 50% was spam or people trying to sell SEO, SEM or PR services. About 20% was mails where I was just put on cc. So over 70% of the mails I read was more or less a waist of time.
Tuesday was bank holiday here in Sweden.
After that I’ve been debriefed by our team leader for operations of what have happened during my time away and what’s the status of certain important projects are. Since the new year started when I was away I spent a couple of hours in Excel making really good looking graphs over last years performance.
By the end of the 2008 we had launched Testfreaks on 24 markets. All though 5 of them was launched on the 28th of December. In 2009 we will launch another 16 markets bringing the total to 40 sites by the end of 2009. All of this will demand very hard work and long hours. Our team will most certainly grow in order to make this possible. We have started to focus a lot more on the quality and will set up measurable targets for the quality of the sites.
If you look at our US site we know have over 100 categories, and we continue launching new ones. We’re adding new review sources every week, but we’re finding it harder and harder to find new sites that keep the good quality. Many of our competitors don’t care about the quality of the review site they add to their site. Therefore it sometimes seems as they have as many sites as we do or more, but there are a lot of sites that we don’t list on Testfreaks, sites that are made just to make money from adsense or other affiliates. We want the sites we recommend for our users to have high quality and really give the user what he/she is looking for when they do their product research.
Anyway, to sum this up. I’ve had three weeks vacation and haven’t feelt this eager to work hard in a long time. 2009 will be the year when everyone on the Internet will learn to know about Testfreaks and how good we are. Our tech team is constantly adding new features to our sites and hopefully you will like them.We are also looking for more programmers, please check out this link. Work at Testfreaks. Sorry about the swedish… if your not speaking english send us a mail and we will help you from there.
I just love internet and the fact that people are willing to help each other when one is in need of some expert help.
I’m a regular user of GAF where you can buy pratically any service in the world. I found a funny project about a man from sweden that needs help with his math course. It’s basically high school math, algebra and stuff like that. He’s willing to pay up to 150 USD per month if the person solves his problem (homework) every friday.
I guess the school wouldn’t like this if they knew about it, the fun part is that they probably never will know about it. But for you that want to know about the cheating person, you can read more here.
He includes examples of the homework he need help with.
Math1 (It’s in swedish)
Math2 (It’s in swedish)
I’ve been using the music streaming service Spotify for a while now, I wrote about it last summer when we tested the service at our office. Or actually it’s my girlfriend that’s been using it the most, since I haven’t gotten it to work on my Linux system. I know it suppose to work under Wine, and I haven’t added that much time to fix it since Linda play the music from here Windows machine instead.
Spotify is the shit when it comes to stream music, but for people like me that don’t know that much music I’ve used recommending engines on Last.fm and latelly in iTunes to find good music. But it hasn’t been satisfying because I don’t really know that many songs or artists.
Today I found a great service, Listiply, that fans of Spotify can use to share their playlists. When I looked around I found another service (Spotify friends) for it as well, but that one wasn’t as great as the first. Don’t know why, I guess it’s a mather of design that I like. The two services ofter the same functionality. So now I can continue to listen to great music without learning the actual songs or artists name. (I can focus on other things in my head)
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.Â
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.Â
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.Â
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.
