Björn Jeffery

It’s nice to see Swedes that are in the forefront of the web these days. Malmö-based Liviu P has started the aptly named site MyTripYourMoney.com in order to raise money for the road trip of his life: riding across America in a Lamborghini Murciélago. Liviu and his associates will document the trip in a blog using video and all the rest. The car, and the site, will be covered in advertising – of course.

This type of meta-advertising is interesting. Although, the project in itself probably won’t be half as interesting as the buzz before. But as long as the exposure is sufficient, this is a way of communicating a brand as any other. Site visitors that are interested can’t be bad – even if the interest is in the phenomenon rather than the project in itself.

tags bloggar.se: mytripyourmoney.com, annonsering, malmö, sverige

I recently moved to a new apartment, and today a letter from my electricity company fell through the letterbox. I thought I’d check out my options with the others and did a Google search for elleverantör miljö, el-leverantör miljö and el leverantör miljö which are three ways of spelling (and misspelling) electricity provider and environment. Two words that one might think would be connected at a time like this.

Not one company had thought of buying sponsored links with those two words in combination. Amazing. Amazing that there still are so many companies that have no clue about the internet, what so ever.

tags bloggar.se: elleverantör, miljö, ipcc, sponsrade länkar

Okay, I’m (somewhat) back. I’ll leave out the details of what happened for now, as this is a blog about my work, not my life. Although it has become obvious that the two are interconnected in more ways than I first had thought.

Instead, more blog posts about the exciting world of the internet will follow. Stay tuned.

I won’t be answering my phone or my e-mail the next few days. Something tragic has happened and I have to deal with it in the best way I can. I’ll let you know when things start to change.

Tomorrow David and I will be hosting the first Likemind-event in Malmö, Sweden. If you like the sound of it, turn up at 9 am at Solde Kaffebar and join us for coffee.

And if you haven’t quite understood what it’s all about, I’ve (also) borrowed a description from Piers:

* You just turn up.

* You don’t have to turn up at 8. You can come sometime between 8 and 10 (or 9 and 11 if your city dictates). And you can go whenever.

* You can do anything for a job. By being so early, it normally means that you do something for a living, but even that’s not altogether necessary either.

* You buy your own coffee and tea, bagels and toast. Although, the longer this runs, we’re not adverse to some nice company offering to cover the cost of coffee across all Likeminds.

* There maybe a Likemind night event but it will be less chatty, more talky. In order to do this we need venues that can hold people. If anyone wants to volunteer something… 🙂

* Two people host Likemind, always. This means if no one else turns up, the hosts have someone to talk to. You can offer to run a Likemind in your city by leaving your details here.

* You have to wear a name badge. Yeah, everyone cringes at first but once you put it on – just see the effect. Wow.

See you there!

tags bloggar.se: likemind, malmö

Catching up on some reading while preparing for a column that I’m writing for Internetworld. A lot of these links aren’t new, but they are definitely worth reading still the same.

Tristan Louis, once employed by Boo.com, lists accurate and interesting points as to why the return of the e-commerce giant makes more sense than ever.

Org 2.0 – the 59 smartest nonprofit organizations online today. I love when well-willing organizations use new technology to enhance their methods.

“VC: So tell me, what’s your go to market strategy?
Entrepreneur: We are going to target bloggers, because they are early adopters.
(…)
* This was an insightful answer in 2003.
* It was an adequate first step in early 2005.
* But it is meaningless in 2007. “

Top 5 Wi-Fi toys at home. As Tog once said at a seminar in Copenhagen that I attended: look at what the nerds are playing with, and then make something useful using the same ideas. Wi-Fi enabled stuff is going to be big this year.

RSS turning mainstream as it becomes easier to track updates than checking back to the site.

Finally, a short interview with me and six other Europeans about the importance of an academic degree. Not at all, is my short answer.

In short – Hong Kong was great! A vibrant city with an interesting mix of East and West, at least if you live on Kowloon rather than the island. We stayed at Langham Place which was excellent.

For being a world city with international corporate presence, the general internet awareness seemed to be surprisingly low. Very few sites were advertised or communicated in other ways. Surprising for me, but it just goes to show that it’s very easy to get blinded by your home market.

I picked up on a few sites though, and thought I’d share them with you below.

AliBaba.com
Alibaba.com claims to be the world’s largest B2B marketplace and is also the site that controls Yahoo China. They have over 3 million registered users from over 200 countries apparently. I had completely missed this site earlier, but it was advertised on every taxi in down town HK. They also own TaoBao which is the largest consumer-to-consumer site in China.

AirAsia.com
Budget airline planning to start cheap London-Kuala Lumpur flights soon. Good connections within Asia. Other low fare airlines I noticed were Jetstar.com, Tiger Airways and Viva Macau.

Danwei
A good tip that I got from Jan Hökerberg at Bamboo. An English site about “Chinese media, advertising, and urban life”. Provides good insight to this interesting and emerging market.

Netvigator.com
The most common email suffix in all the classifieds. Seems to be a local broadband operator.

Qihoo.com
A Chinese forum content aggregator. Recently lost a law suit against Yahoo China through installing software that claimed that Yahoos toolbar was malware.

Xunlei.cn
Chinese video download service that got funding from Google while I was there. According to SCMP, the site has 100 million registered users and gains 400 000 new every day. Sounds a bit steep to me.

Baidu.com
Last but not least. You can’t talk about Chinese internet sites and not mention Baidu.com. I saw figures from iResearch that credited Baidu.com to 63,7% of the Chinese search market while Google only had 19,2%.

By the way, flying to Hong Kong has never been as cheap as now. Check out Oasis Hong Kong Airlines for a low fare flight in an ex-Singapore Airlines aircraft.

(If you like these sorts of posts, here are a few sites from England and some (Swedish) thoughts on Estonia here and here.)

tags bloggar.se: alibaba.com, jetstar.com, tiger airways, viva macau, bamboo, qihoo, qihoo.com, xunlei, xunlei.com, baidu.com, oasis hong kong, langham place Ping Intressant.se

I’m home! And as soon as I get my daily rhythm going I’ll post a few thoughts and links on Hong Kong.

But before that, I just want to invite everyone to Malmös first Likemind session. I will be hosting it together with David Carlson, from David Report.

Let´s meet at Friday the 19th at Solde kaffebar on Regementsgatan 2 in Malmö at 9 am, and then take it from there. Thanks to Piers, Noah and Nick!

tags bloggar.se: likemind, malmö

Edit: Thanks David… 🙂

Saying that IM works as usual turned out to be a bit of an overstatement, I’m sorry to say. Actually, hardly anything works on the internet due to the recent earthquake. On the bright side, I have been forced to deal with my internet addiction 😉

As soon as I can access things again I’ll write a few notes on my experiences. Until then, the Swedish readers of this blog can read the article I wrote for Goteborgs-Posten. It’s a series about life in ten years time, and I was asked to participate on the topic of internet and identity.

Update: I just saw the picture that they put in the paper – it’s like eight years old! God damnit…