Archive for Web 2.0

Google Chrome is better then Firefox

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.

Magento as CMS

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.

Twit - Greatest podcast ever

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.

Iphone with 3G - finally!

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?

I’ve Cloned my self to get more time for strategic work

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.

Loaded, a new cnet tv programme

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

Use Jaiku with Wordpress

I finally got it to work. Actually it wasn’t that hard. Once I knew what to look for :)

So basically for all people how follow my microbloging at Jaiku, now you can also see my posts from this blog.

I found a good description on how-to use Jaiku with Wordpress written by RickMeasham

Is web2.0 really a bubble?

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.

Hubbub 07

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.

The people behind Hubbub07

Daytona Sessions vol 2

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.