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
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.
Since I’m in the business of so called Web2.0 projects I can’t stop wondering on where all the money goes. All these new named (often stupid names) companies that have great ideas (most of them do), they get a lot of venture capital lives a few month or up to a year and then they spent all there money. The trend looks like it did in the end of 2001, but this time Internet companies actually make money, and there are income models that works online. I stumbled over this really fun video about this problem.
This weekend there was an interesting conference, around the web and mobile applications, held in Stockholm. I missed the registration to the event, so I thought I had missed it entirely. But when I surfed around on Hubbub’s homepage I found the back channels on Jaiku and Onelinr, so the first hour I tried to follow the conference from them. But it didn’t workout that good since I missed sound and video from the people that talked on stage. I then discovered that I had a colleague from Testfreaks sitting in the audience, and he phoned me up on Skype. This way I could listen to the entire conference through his built-in microphone. This was an interesting and new (for me) way to attend a conference. I even got the chance, through the back channels at Jaiku, to ask Hjalmar Winbladh from Rebtel a question I had about the Android.
Next time I hope the people behind Hubbub set up a proper Skypeconference that many people can login to and listen. Since the entire event is held in English there must be a big potential audience for this kind of events.
I haven’t written any in a long time, mainly because I haven’t had time. It’s so much to do at Testfreaks at the moment, we are really showing good progress.
Last week I went to Daytona Session vol 1, in Stockholm. Daytona Session was is an Internet Conference that discussed the online future and what will come the next five years.
One of the speakers, Johan Ronnestam at Foreign, had a really interesting speak about this, where he listed 10 things to come the next 5 years.
He gave a good brief in what he thought was the really good things that would come over the next years. He spoke about some new business marketing roles that we might see over the next years. Where SEO manager where the top one. But he also mentioned some other new interesting roles as feed content managers, social customer manager(handle all customer support online on every community that excist), where the companies need to be more focused on what information they are spreading and how they deliver these.
It will be really interesting to see if there will be more of this, hopefully a volym 2 with more internet focus. It was a little bit to much about journalism mumbo jumbo.
If you understand swedish, you can take a look at Johan Ronnestams presentations here.
Take a moment to think of how the future will look like on the internet. And what will the next generation of Internet users do online? What will be the next big thing online? When will the majority of Africa connect?
I read about this new company today, on idg.se, that will use Bittorrent technology to distribute new movies to consumers. The consumer will then be able to watch the movie from the computer or burn it on a dvd. Headweb have made there own client for distribution and payments. Instead of using DRM technology (copyright protections) they will make a watermark in the movie, like the one that are used for cinema film distributions. Headweb write this on there webpage about this - “The invisible watermark will not cause any problems for you legal and honest users but increases the risk of getting caught for those who illegally spread the movies. We believe watermarking is a good compromise so that you won’t have to deal with complicated copy protections.”
Headweb will in the beginning be distribute swedish and european movies in there network but they will probably be signing deals with all the big major players in Hollywood. They will have 500 titles available in the beginning.
Last week I started up a new relation with an Indian company that will deliver operators to me. Earlier I’ve been very negative towards Indian outsourcing but I’m on my way to change all this. The Indian people and companies are excellent outsourcing destinations in some areas, and really bad in other areas. I’ve been handling outsourcing here for about a year now, and so far I only had bad experience with Indian programmers. But in the last couple of weeks I’ve been focusing on non programming outsourcing.
I had my first positive experience with Indian outsourcing business four weeks ago, when I hired a new Quality analytics to help me ensure the quality of our work. I told her about my former trouble with Indians, and she told me not to worry. This girl that I found is really good, she works hard and are very eager to learn new things. So last we I decided to test another company that will deliver operators (BPO) to me. At the moment there are two people sitting in Chennai, India. And it works really good!
I will write more about this later, at the moment my team are 20 people in 8 different locations.
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.
