Oliver Thylmann’s Thoughts

Once again, I have found another that I truly love. I started reading Ilium well over a year ago and stopped again because it was just confusing. I mean it starts with some small robot under water trying to get away from something huge, a group of people that seem to live in all too happy times and that can teleport (fax), and a little bit of Achilles, Troja, Zeus and other.

A few weeks ago I gave it another try and once you get over the initial hump it is amazing. When you have finished Ilium you will surely run out to buy the second part called Olympos. The only thing is that the end of Olympos is a little swift. Hundreds of pages of great story telling and in the last 100 its done. The end is good but it seems a little bit like Dan didn’t want to continue any longer, even though I wouldn’t know from the top of my head what to change, other than wanting to know more … I started to really like the characters. Whenever somebody wants ot make that into a film, it will really be the most expensive film ever

Have a good reading time. It’s thought provoking in a lot of places.

Yesterday I got my new Wacom Bamboo, a tablet that is ment to be a mouse replacement and I have to admit that it actually is. The biggest switch seems to be that I need to get used to holding a pen in the left hand and moving around on the screens with my left hand, instead of with my mouse on the right. At the moment I actually have both sitting at my laptop which is cool. I am missing the scroll wheel a little bit which is kind of there on the tablet but still a bit weird.

There are actually two settings you will have on the Mac if you plug it in and install the driver. One is for Ink and the other one for the Wacom Bamboo configuration. There you can configure the 4 special buttons on the tablet and the two buttons on the pen. The cool thing is that you can set these buttons to full keystrokes, meaning that the buttons FN1 and FN2 on the tablet are copy and paste (Applekey + C or V) and the top button on the pen is Apple+W which closes the active window, cool for using the browser. I might come up with other wonderful key compinations. The other keys on the tablet are TAB and Ink On/Off and right click for the second key on the pen. It is working pretty well with these kind of keys.

Another important setting is whether you want to use the tablet as a mouse or pen. I am using it as a pen meaning that the surface of my tablet kind of is the surface of my two monitors together. Tapping top left, will put the mouse top left on the left monitor, then top right on the top of the right monitor. The cool thing here is that you will get used to the Bamboo and the size ratios and slowly but surely know where to move the pen to have the mouse where you want it to be and that is a real time saver.

There are also some nice smaller things. I open GMail, click a mail, tab the one key on the tablet to enable ink, draw a Y on the screen and boom the mail is archived. Now that is wonderfully easy. I will have to play a bit more with Ink to really get used to using that one.

All in all I am starting to get really happy with using a pen instead of a mouse. That’s really what the tablet is built for. I having drawn with it yet but it might actually be too small for that. But more posts on playing with Ink will likely follow.

This is really what the New York Times has done. As a short disclosure, I do own Apple stock, and I do want an iPhone, and I do know that it makes no sense whatsoever (and hence will likely not buy one) because there are many key things that the thing is missing. Here are a few more things after having posted two previous items.

Here we go, and I only include those that I think are real problems, above and beyond my last point.

1. the iPhones 25 ring tones are your only choice. It’s a full MP3 player and you can’t use the MP3s as ring tone. Ehhh… oook.
2. You cannot use standard headphone as a small plastic modling prevents headphone plugs from seating correct. Thank god there will be adapters to spend your money on.
3. the bluetooth only works with hands-free devices like Bluetooth Headsets or freespeak stuff for your car. No keyboard, no computer. WHAT? Yes, the phone cannot act as wireless modem for your laptop. But we already know that EDGE is too slow anyway.
4. Songs, Files, Calendar, Contacts, Software Updates … all go through the USB charging cradle. Thank god your can use the phone while in the cradle, not as a modem it seems, not at your head (as the speaker is at the bottom) and not with your favorite headset as it doesn’t fit.
5. You cannot make a phone call when using the EDGE network … I hope it rings at least.
   
6. ToDo items do not show up on the iPhone, Notes from the Phone not on your PC.
7. They are still tapping with one index finger after 2 weeks and not with two thumbs. 

I admit, this might still be a success, but somehow, it’s not that great a product than the previous ones. I mean the iPod was not only designed very well but it was also a wonderful package better than anything else out there in terms of hard disk players. The iPhone is well designed, has a few good features, but some things that are just need good. Looking forward to seeing where this moves. The first adopters will buy it anyway, possibly even use it, and the real question comes how many they sell until end Q3 and Q4 and what the next update looks like. And Apple, sometimes you need to let the user decide. Yes 3G drains the battery some more but that’s my choice.

or how to really suck! I was weary I have to say. Buying a vacuum cleaner is really nothing that should cost a lot of money and you can probably get one for well under 100 EURs. But somehow there is this company called Dyson that makes vacuum cleaners that are just cool. I actually had one case study about Dyson during the MBA course and it really took some time for the founder to convince people that this was a good idea. I mean look at how ugly their hand vacuum is!

I for one was just in the market for a new vacuum cleaner and being a geek, all this centrifuge and other mambo jumbo obviously appealed to me. Having cats added to the fact that I really needed to take a look at Dyson and I now wound up buying the Dyson DC 08 T Animalpro (links at the end). This has a special system against cat hair and a filter against allergies. The standard price here in Germany is 519 EURs! What the F***! That is probably your first reaction. I can buy a MacMini for that the second one.

I actually got it 330 EURs from Amazon. Still a lot but not 519. And then it arrived, as always ugly as hell, amazing color, and home it went. The weekend was the time of trying it out and oh the wonder. This thing does put cleaning on a different level, the air even smells differently afterwards. The only scary thing is that you are wondering if you lived in a pigs place because of the amount of dirt it picks up even if you used your old vacuum cleaner before. It’s also not too heavy at 8 kg and comes with lots of fine extras for cleaning your car and stuff.

All in all I do not regret it one bit. It’s expensive but it is worth it. And that you have to empty the dust by hand is something that you will get used to and it is actually well solved to be easy.

Now to try to see if there is any meaningful amount of money to be made from affiliate product links, I hereby present you the direct links to my Amazon aStores. And yes, this is a real review, I am not making this up and I really think the product is good. USA Store (mine does not exist there, this is a similar one) - German Store 

We have a start-up in town and it’s called Shoppero. The general idea of a user driven review system, sharing the revenue with the users, allowing widgets to be placed on web sites with your review, … all that is good and I can see this thing succeed to some extent. The problem is that it is (was?) way over-hyped. We all know that Nico is very optimistic about the future and with Jens Kunath joining in, things are sure to get hot in the current investment climate. Underpromise and Overdeliver guys.

In times such as these, it is no failure to fall short of realizing all that we might dream, - the failure is to fall short of dreaming all that we might realize. We must try. - Dee Hock

They are going in the right direction, even though we already hear of all the problems, first and foremost huge holes in the platform. Werblogger wrote some things together and also pointed to this post on thinkphp about the big XSS hacks. Werblogger also pointed to the problem of the general rules of the platform, but Nico already corrected the point that they will not use your email for spamming. Didn’t expect that and I know that you will write your rules a bit more carefully if you are in a hurry.

But they need to be fast, because the platform is fairly simple to build. Hell, they did it in 6 weeks for a first release. Signing up you will get an Amazon aStore for example, but that is very easy to build and it took me a few minutes (store in german for now). Of course they will connect more affiliate systems but Amazon is really working on having almost everything available, so you are mostly fine there. And if you are big enough to turn any meaningful revenue for other stuff, you can do that too. Of course, this is long tail, but as said, this thing could work.

It just comes to the biggest problem I see with their communication strategy. They are saying that you will make more money with it. Jens had a long post about traffic optimization. The general idea is to give the user what he wants as an ad, and that even Google AdSense is not relevant enough in many case. Why is relevance so important? Because it will lead to higher click through rates. I can even totally attest to that because I have run performance marketing systems for some time now. Now Jens argues that through Shoppero bloggers will be able to get higher revenues than by other means at the moment. Sadly, there it brakes for me. That is total nonsense.

It’s a pretty simple calculation really. You can get a 1% CTR and more on AdSense if you place them right. Now let’s presume you are making $1 CPM on AdSense through this. That means that 1000 impressions lead to 10 clicks worth $0.1 each. That is not a lot and you can probably go higher, but lets be conservative. Now let’s look at my last 10 posts to see how relevant my ads are. I have router management and dsl ads on my Fonera post, the unddu.de post has social networking in there, my first post about mymuesli.com has VC stuff and the VOIP via Mobile post has lot of fitting VoIP links. All in all very fitting and nothing in there that would lead to a higher click through rate in my mind if I had linked my Canon EOS 350D or Nokia E70 or some Books or Wine or any other product. I mean Fon is linked anyway, mymuesli too and stuff like Jajah and Cellity are linked to. Nothing for Shoppero to earn there unless they change my links which I won’t let them do.

But let’s presume I do post about the Nokia E70 and how much I like it. Let’s presume that 1000 people read it (probably $1 earned via AdSense, possibly more as there would be other high paying E70 links). As the direct link to an E70 it might have a better CTR and let’s presume that it is 5%. Most of those would probably not even want to read a review (they just did) but get more info on the E70. The many people that don’t know me, are very unlikely to do an impulse buy of a phone (or any product) and will probably continue to think about it. Those that do know me, will probably send an email to get more views, pretty similar to how Jens bought his E61. In any case, many will not buy in a trackable manner but somewhere else. Knowing conversion rates of special landing pages for free services, I do not think that they will get conversions anywhere near or above 1% from after the click. And if I then get $10 for the sale, I would get 60% of the $5 made, meaning $3.

This obviously is more (5% is a high CTR! 2% and you are lower) but the problem is that it presumes that every post I do has a fitting review to it. That is surely not the case and if it is 1 to 10 than it is a high ratio. Suddenly I am only making 30 cents. Of course I am also making money on the stuff that Shoppero lists on their site (20%) but Squidoo tried that too and failed. Above that, suddenly it is no longer about making money via my blog but almost free for Shoppero. Above that I have work as I need to create the widget and it’s not ala AdSense where you put the code on your site and you are done. Sure, review bloggers can make money, but they also can with linking to Amazon directly or joining other Affiliate Systems. And yes, you are also making money on other stuff Shoppero makes money with, like AdSense, but I am pretty sure that you are making more integrating AdSense on your blog directly than by loosing people through click through rates and through an additional revenue share.

Jens actually suggests adding an adget (how they call their ads) on the right side of your blog which means that CTRs are way lower than at the end of the article (I know). It’s also no longer context sensitive, which is the entire point. As a short background, I have run AdSense similar ads for services on some of the biggest publishers and am doing that again, and we did beat out Google AdSense (and are doing it again with Ormigo for relevant traffic). The more interesting thing is though that one publishers opted to put links from a big affiliate system at the same spot (good for them, you need to try stuff out!) but stopped doing it after a very short time even though they probably got way bigger commissions than normally or rather good CPM without consideration for conversion (which is why the affiliate system stopped doing it :)).

The thing is that sales are just barely trackable on the net. Too much moves outside the tracking system. I would be very happy to be proved wrong, because we need something more for blogs. We are moving the same direction with Ormigo, going more long tail on the advertising system, but first need to increase the breadth of offerings where we can create customer contacts (which are instantly trackable). It’s hard. Blogs are very diverse, and relevance is a must.

As a summary. I think for special niche blogs or for pages with reviews, Shoppero might make sense. Then it might be too much work for the hassle though. I’ll probably add an Amazon aStore to the right side of the blog soon to try it out (too much US traffic that Shoppero can’t handle and OpenAds can do the targeting for me for Germany and other Traffic.)

Good luck with your start-up, it’s interesting times.

Update: There are other things than only monetary reward for using a system. This is something that Shoppero can play, because they are the nice guys. One of their biggest benefits that is.