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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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 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.

I’m not sure how many actually reads this blog, I guess I should add some google analytics to it to find out. I’ve been looking at some different web shop software, I would really like to find a good open source developed web shop to set up. I’ve found some interesting things about Magento in a swedish forum when I was scanning the net for this. I haven’t done anything else then installed it locally on my laptop that runs Ubuntu. And it seems to work without any fixing at all. That’s really good.

I will get back to you on this. My idéea is to set up some web shops just to see how many customers that are willing to purchase things from it. Everyday at work I get mails from Chinese companies that want to sell me things, and I have good connections in Yanti, China to ship things for Sweden. So my thoughts was to setup one shop in osCommerce and one in Magento to see what shop is best.

I’ll get back with the results.

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