Nickeluli

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…

One big part of my work is research, since I always need to know how much review sites, and manufacturer that are represented on a market before we enter it. Much of this research (95%) is done by online market researchers. I always try to find local people living in the country, it’s always easier because they often know of these sites before we start the research.

I found it to be very important that the researcher have an interest in the area that they are doing the research. Two weeks ago I gave the exact same project to two researchers, just to see the difference. The result got me to question all my previous research projects. I wanted them to find me as many good review sites as possible in a big Asian country, not China. I told them I didn’t want forum, blogs or any spam sites (MFA).

Person1, lives in US but have language knowledge of the specific country and have a strong interest in all sorts of gadgets, came back with a list of more then 100 review sites.

Person2, lives in India and have worked with online research for four years and and have language knowledge of the specific country, came back with a list of 15 sites and told me there was not possible to find any more sites. And he had been working for a really long time.

I can also tell you that the cost of the research had big difference, person1 cost 150$, person2 cost me 50$. One of the reasons for person1 cost me more is that he’s located in US, but that was something I knew from the start. I just wanted to compare a online researcher from India with a research from US.

When I told person2, that I already had found more then 100 review sites in the country he wanted to try again, and a few days later he sent me a list with all the 100 first sites he had found in Google, mostly crap sites. It was e-commerce sites (without reviews), forum, blogs and other sites that I had no use of at all. I told him to seek work in another work segment. I told him that he had made a bad and sloppy research. Then he told me that I was a very bad buyer that didn’t understood the quality of my work, and then he told me that Americans where much better buyers and never distrusted his research.

At the moment I have 10 projects for market research running in countries all over the world, and I’ve stopped using the cheapest one. On all these projects there where a lot of Indian firms and freelancers bidding on them. But as always I raise a warning for these firms and people, make sure they really have the language skills that are needed and ask them for some kind of examples of research in the specific country.

Good luck with all your online research

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.

Sure, it’s very cheap to use freelancers on the internet but beware of the quality in there work. Of course, most of the people working as freelancers are very good. But as this market grows each day, a lot of non serious persons are entering the market. If you hire freelancers on the internet, make sure that they know what they are doing and they can deliver what you want before you start working with them.

Since we are about to launch Testfreaks soon, I’m handling all the quality checking (with help of freelancers of course). When I look at our competitors on the net, I see that they are more interested in having lots of products with even more reviews rather then a good quality. They have totally missed out on the quality in the service they delivering. On we want the user to comeback over and over again, because of the good quality in our service.

I talked to a friend that needed some help with his php programming and hired an Indian freelancer from one of the big sites. The prgrammer promised to deliver within five days, after five days my friend asked for the finished function but was told he needed another three days. This function was very important for my friend, since his site really needed this upgrade. Nothing happened after three more day, my friend had now lost two weeks of time. Two weeks are a long time on the internet if you should try to keep your regular users. My friend finally gave up and hired a freelancer that I recommended him, and got the job done on two days. Always beware of freelancers that promise a lot and have no feedback from old users. All the mayor big freelancer sites on the net show feedback of there users.

Good luck everyone.

Take a look at our new category page, camcorder reviews.

Yesterday I returned to work again, after a short vacation (2 weeks).

Since Testfreaks are almost ready for beta launch (sign up here), there’s a lot of work to do at the moment. Most of my work right now is to ensure the quality of the data we are going to present on Testfreaks.

Hopefully you will love our new review service.

Today at lunch I was finally ready to start work, how is it possible to get that many mails and questions from my freelance team and other people? I was away for two weeks and my colleagues have done some of my work during his time. Still there’s a lot of stuff that I’m behind in the schedule (my own schedule).

Once again I’ve been disappointed when hiring Indian personal, they fail to deliver. So from now on I will never hire another Indian freelancer for work on Testfreaks. Instead I’ve started up a new long-term relation with a programming company in Xi’an, China. They help me with the Chinese part of Testfreaks.

Our plan is to initially launch Testfreaks in Sweden, US, UK, Germany, France and Spain. But there are more market coming right behind, hopefully Russia and China will be next along with Scandinavian markets.