Hello Martin

Source: Jurvertson

I read a lot of magazines, and i picked up this month’s Vogue to, it’s funny because it’s thicker than the Ikea Catalog (which is the most read yearly publication in the world btw) - The current issue is supposed to be 840 pages thick, it’s so thick i almost tilted on my way home from buying it.
As most people will understand though much of the 840 pages is not written content, but purely advertisements.

Last week i was lucky enough to be able to sit down with a former Editor in Chief and Editor of several of the world’s largest magazines, and i inquired on the subject. He stated Vogue was one of those lucky print publications where the people who bought the issues, bought it largely because of the ads.
And therein lie the beauty of Vogue, most other publications would have their readers raging from the lack of journalistic content compared to the overwhelming amount of ads, but Vogue’s readers seem to be happier the more ads there is, and what was also noted during the discussions was that the cost of buying a full page ad in a 840 page issue would be just as much as buying one if there was fewer pages, which in Vogue’s case means $$$ So i think Anna Wintour is sitting safe for now, so there you have it, this is why i would love to  own Vogue, because it’s simply one of the very few  “mediums” in which the users wants to see ads, oh yeah i wouldn’t mind owning it so all the girls would come and run after me instead of me running after them… but that’s a different story.

“What you want to watch out for is the continuous drop…”

With more and more subprime mortgages hitting their 2 year limit on set interest and the flexible interest starts kicking in it’s helpful to have a dollar or two saved, especially if your house hasn’t increased in value and hence your most likely source of “wealth” wouldn’t have increased which is the natural thing that can off set any extra spending…
(2005 was the first year to have a negative savings since the great depression)

(Disclosure the above is only my observation, and should not be taken as any guidance)

So i love my panasonics, i use the W and R series at the same time, and they have served me great, but it feels like it’s time for an upgrade, and i think i have finally found a replacement for one of the above. I think i will get a
Sony Vaio G which weights 0.89 kg’s (carbon fiber baby!)

So woke up this morning to do my daily blackberry check…

to my little suprise instead of scrolling through the 4000-5000 emails/txt’s that was on the phone, now there was NOTHING, called T-mobile up, and they explained that there was a known “glitch” so if you where low on memory the software would ERASE all the messages, but RIM had published a software update you could load in to the mobile (pearl) - I’m glad the took the decision to notify all the people out there that this was an existing problem NOT!

How online communications players can’t even distribute a message like that blows me away, if you compare it to any normal retail recall and how effectively they get their message out there.

Anyways, RIM you stink and i hope your stock goes down!

So TechCrunch and Venturebeat is writing about Glam trying to raise $200 million, i have known for a while that they’ve been looking at additional capital, but did not know they where looking for that much.

Basically from my understanding pretty much all of that money would go towards acquiring websites within their network, and removing the % they pay them. If Glam is the correct company to do that i do not know, having looked in to this space for a couple of years i do find the move rather interesting overall though (independent of company whom does it)

The online women’s space have grown massively last 2-3 years and there is more sites popping up all the time with high quality content. However a lot of them don’t focus on monetization because it’s simply a hobby, which in Glam’s case makes the acquisition cost a lot cheaper.

And here in lies one of the big possibilities but also potential downfalls, Glam would be buying websites for it’s content publication which would mean the people would need to stay on and continue writing the content, that’s all fine but they can drop out at any time after whatever contract period is set to run out.

I think Glam is thinking that they can bring in and increase earnings per user, not only by CPM but placing ads at the correct place, and using affiliate programs more effectively, and then interlinking the different websites for a complete offering.
(The Knot have a bit of a similar strategy with their different web properties, ps The Knot has one of the most impressive earnings per user i’ve ever seen for a web company)

In the PPM that Glam has put out there is something which does baffle me a little bit:

“Revenue grew from $94,000 in the first quarter of 2006 to $1.6 million
in the first quarter of 2007. Glam is in its initial growth stages and is building up its sales force. Q2 2007 revenue is $2.2 million, a 38% sequential quarter-over-quarter growth rate.”

And then they expect to be doing $21 million in revenue this year? i honestly just don’t see where that growth would come from, i could see them hitting close to $15 million, but without any acquisitions i heavily doubt they would be able to hit that estimate.

HomeAway (raised over $200 mill, and bought top 5 vacation rental sites) is probably the closest you can get to what Glam is trying to do, the big difference in buying vacation rental websites was that the revenue stream already existed, and you weren’t dependant on people in the same way as Glam would be.

We’ve also seen consolidation likes this before but in a more spread out manner foremost thinking of Internet Brands who just filed a S1 preparing for IPO, and Demandmedia who will most likely file for a IPO sometime next year, and i would guess once Glam would do over $150 million in rev they would file for IPO to.

8 million blackberry users, and still not one single working calendar application with online sync, sigh…

Just as i am amazed that there isn’t a online calendar application, where people can suggest a meeting time, and then the calendar owner can approve the time.

A plugin for wordpress to send images in emails to be automatically published.

C’mon people, someone must have time to build this!

Portfolio just published a really good story on us, i think Jocelyn did a great piece covering something which is rather hard to explain in many times, because of the huge set of data we process, and the upsides of it.

And i really do believe it touches portfolio’s mantra with “the story behind the story”

So thanks for the article, and thanks for letting me visit the Conde Nast cafeteria for a couple of hours, very appreciated (For those not in the known, conde nast publishes vogue, glamour etc, and well i can only say that it probably has the best looking and most well dressed staff in the country)
(No that’s not me in the picture!)

Yes i happened to pick it up at Valleywag, where they have a picture of Karl rove using the iphone, i played around with the iphone for a couple of days before i sent it off to a friend, and the one thing which was an absolute no-no for me was the issue of not currently being able to add applications to it. And hence we come to my point, now i am no expert at all when it comes to mobile security but i have seen a thing or two, i would assume someone like Karl Rove gets a hand fall of security clearance needed calls to his cellphone, hence i would also assume it would be encrypted, considering you can’t change any of the applications on the iphone, and the added encryption devices you can put on some cellphones most likely isn’t available i do obviously ask the question, is Karl Rove using a standard phone just like anyone else? Then from there on i will let you do your own conclusion….

Photo credit: Time

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RjQEJjF2Rc WATCH IT!

Date:      Fri, 3 Aug 2007 20:20:06 +0100 [09:20:06 PM CEST]
From:      Friend
To:      Martin Schaedel
Subject:      Instant Messaging
Headers:      Show All Headers
Email with martin is like instant messaging with anything else.

——————————–

(I was complaining that he never signed on to any IM)

Have a good weekend all.

Congrats Lars to your IPO filling for successfactors.com

Michael, congrats on sale of both Dictionary.com and now clubpenguin.com!

And Ed, congrats on you buying dictionary.com

This is starting to get really interesting!