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.
The summer is on it’s way and with that comes all these questions on what fun things to do during the summer. I was thinking on going on a road trip with some of my friends, we haven’t managed to decied where we’re going. But I was thinking of driving down through Denmark, Germany and try to reach the eastern part of Europe. I’ll write more about this later…
The biggest news at the moment is that I’ve left Testfreaks. The economic recession and the fact that people don’t buy as much consumer electronic products as before have gotten our trafic and conversion to go down. The company therefor decieded to let 5 people go inkl yours truly to cut some of it’s costs.
My task when I got to Testfreaks was to found a operations team outside of Sweden that could provide high quality work at a resonable price per month. And this I have been doing with a fantastic achievement. We started working with a Ukrainian company that have evolved into a very good relation. We do also work with Chinese, Philippines, Russians, Brasilians and Indians to mention some of the other people working with Testfreaks.
When I left Testfreaks my operationsteam was a well oiled team with 25 people working close together with Skype, msn, gtalk, YahooIM and other communication plattforms, to make Testfreaks the largest and best review site in the world. .I will still keep my stocks in the company and I’m still convinced that the company will do great online.
Due to the recenssion and the fact that the company needed to save money I figure they will cut the spending on some of these workers and therefor they also thought it would be best if I left as well. I’ve done a great work and have the best recommendations from our CEO but now it’s time for me to do something else. The big question is what?
Currently I’m working together with an old friend of mine with his new mobile application that will be release on the techcrunch meet up in Stockholm in the end of may. I promise you it’s a great product. Available on almost all platforms except Windows mobile. (The iPhone app is really great).
I’m also evaluating the possibility to either take a new job or create my own company. I’ve also had a thing for e-commerce. I think there’s still big potential for e-commerce in Europe and especially in Sweden. I haven’t found any e-commerce site that have done what I want to do regarding design and functions. This is also why I’ve started experimenting with a Magento which I think is a great back-end system for e-commerce.
When I was working with Testfreaks I couldn’t find the time for all my small projects that I been wanting to tryout for several years. What I have done during these 2.5 years I’ve worked with Testfreaks is to write these idéas down and bought some domains for it. Now is the time to start working on these idéas.
I’ve gotten an office space in central Stockholm (Kungsholmen) thanks to my friend Per at Grandriver. So I will use that space three days a week and the other two days I will work with the mobile application company that I wrote about above. But you don’t become a great entreprenuer by just working 5 days a week. So you will probably see me with my laptop on coffee house during the weekends as well.
If someone with a great idéa or company are reading this and would like to hire me either for work or for something else don’t hesitate to contact me. I’m available on this blog name @ gmail.com. You can also take a look at my Linkedin profile or follow me on Twitter.
Why is it only 24 hours in a day? I would need at least 12 more hours to per day. I would use those extra hours to work-out (New Year’s resolution) be with my friends and take care of my girlfriend. A couple month ago I remembered I read about a man in Sweden that only sleep for 2.5 hours, he took micro breaks for 25 min every fourth hour.
Since I got back from my vacation I’ve had a lot to do, both at home and at work. At home we are finally getting settled in the new apartment and we only have a few more paintings to put up on the wall and after that we will have a welcome party for all our friends. At work it’s been a lot of focus on key metrics and measurable values that we can benchmark over time. It’s always important to keep a look at the competitors and what they do. And for me that means keep an eye on their newly added review sources and partners on each market.
In the beginning of each new year we set goals that should be achieved by the end of the year. One of my goals this year is to launch another 16 markets for Testfreaks. And today we welcome Testfreaks Denmark to the family. A couple of other markets is also in the pipeline, but I will get back on that later.
One good effect with the financial crise is that the amount of programmers and freelancers outside of Sweden have increased and it’s much easier to find good workers. However it’s still seems to be very difficult to find programmers in Sweden that will join the Testfreaks staff. On our swedish site we have a couple of different jobs listed, take a look here. Work at Testfreaks (sorry about the swedish). Mainly we are looking for people with knowledge in Ruby and that wants to work with Ruby on Rails.
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.
As I’ve previoused written I have a large team siting all around the globe working close together with me and the other in the team. At present there are 23 people to make sure the perform at the very best all time. And that’s not easy, but it’s easier now when they know eachother and the fact that I can benchmark them and send reports each week that shows there performance over the last couple of weeks.
I can then use this benchmark when we are negotiating contracts and fees, since I’m always paying for performance this kind of measuring numbers are important. I’m working on more keyfigures that can be used to measure the work they do.
Another thing that was and still sometimes is a problem for me is how you demo a new function in the system. I mostly use Skype, Msn, Yahoo IM, Gtalk and other instant messenger clients to chat with my personal. But sometimes you need to show them a demo as well, and I’ve been experimenting with shared desktops, video tutorials, text tutorials with images but still I haven’t found the best way.
What I’ve noticed is that programmers often tend to learn faster with text and images, and for other services we can use shared desktops. But I also have people working from places where 0.5 Mbps are considered high speed internet. For those people I’ve been unable to use shared desktop, so we have tried with video tutorials. All these different kinds of system take a lot of time, not to mention the fact that we are constantly changing things in our systems.
From the beginning I was uncertain that I could trust all the people in the team, I therefore didn’t not share contacts with them. I was the only person that had contact with the rest, but as some of them have worked with me for two years I now have no problem giving them access and the possibility to talk to each other. There’s a lot to win on this. Instead of them asking me things, they start by asking the other people in the team. And if they can’t solve it together they ask me.
All this sounds great, but I can still sometimes have the to much of there work are depending on me. We have therefore decided to hire a new person that will report to me and handle a lot of this work. I will be working more strategic. This will be great and it will also make it much easier to scale the team.
The summer is finally over (hm… good/or bad?).
Slowly everyone is returning to the office, and the developments of Testfreaks are speeding up again. I’ve had a great summer, with a lot of fun thing. I have been working all summer, and I really need a long vacation. But instead of having a long summer vacation I’ve been planing on going to Thailand over christmas and new year.
This morning when I got back from a week in England with no internet connection I had over 600 mails in my inbox. Most of it was actually spam, but after spending three hours setting actions on the 10% of real mails I had I could finally focus at work.
Working with a decentralized organisation, is very special. And when your going on a vacation you need a way to make sure that work will continue even though I’m not at the office. And thanks to Niel, my team leader on the Philippines I could focus on having a good time with my girlfriend.
In the near future we have decided to make Testfreaks bigger, and we will be hiring new people. Both in Sweden and outside of Sweden. This will ensure a bigger and even greater review site in future. Our focus is still to be the best and biggest review site online, and we are soon there 
In the next couple of month we will add a lot of new categories on Testfreaks, and we see great potentials…
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.
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.
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.