Have you ever heard of Coolstuff.se?
I suppose you have. At least if you are from Sweden and have done something of the following during the last years:

• used sites like google and facebook
• read magazines or visiting websites containing new technology
• read blogs

…or if you just got something weird from your older brother last christmas and asked where he bought it. He probably answered Coolstuff.

Coolstuff is a Swedish company with a vision to offer their customers the coolest, nicest and the most innovative stuff on the market. They have a lot of different things – they sell stuff that are totally useless to most people, but that are awesome according to a few individuals. They are a company using the retailing concept the Long Tail.

The Long Tail is, very simply described, a concept based on selling a lot of different hard-to-find stuff to a lot of different people. By keeping the distribution and storing costs down, it is possible to offer a wide range of different things. As a internet company it is possible to have only a few products in stock, or none at all. In a regular store you have more of a demand to have the thing in store – otherwise you might lose the customer.

As I earlier brought up, Coolstuff is a site using very effective marketing through facebook, google, magazines and blogs. If you are searching for gifts, christmas presents or just cool stuff using google, you will probably end up at coolstuff.se sooner or later. If you are using facebook, you can see their ads on the right side from time to time. If you are reading blogs, you will probably see that many blogers recommend the site or are sponsored by the site. If you read magazines about new technical things, they usually contain something from Coolstuff.

The point is that they use this kind of marketing (through social media) to create a strong brand. If they just have ads on google, people will recognize their name. The same on facebook. By getting first page hits on keywords on google or getting their unique products published in magazines, people will enter the site. By having positive comments about the site in blogs etc, that also might end up on google’s first page, people will get a positive picture of the company.

A first page listing on google can be as good marketing as a first page ad in any newspaper. But is coolstuff really first page material? what do you think?

Once when I bought a CD by a pretty unknown guy I found a very strange sentence in the back of the cover. “Feel free to copy … Because I did“. He was a singer-songwriter and had been influenced by some chords and some lines and remade them into own songs. But I couldn’t tell. I loved his attitude though. I think it is OK to “borrow” things in music, but not to steal. Some sampled hip-hop songs are really fantastic, I will admit that. But there is a line between being influenced and to steal. I will put up two pictures I made to illustrate.

This guy is my latest superhero. I call him “HomerMarioPhantomSpidermanBatmanSupermanHulk”.
But he is not OK. He is just stolen parts from other more famous work, and I would probably get sued.

 

 

 

 

 

 

This guy on the other hand I had like to call the “T-man”. He is made from “HomerMarioPhantomSpidermanBatmanSupermanHulk”, but could you tell if you wouldn’t have seen the previous picture? Obviously not. And “T-man” would be OK, at least in my opinion, even though he is influenced by several other characters. The thing is that he is only influenced by others, not stolen.

The reggae-guy in the “Good Copy Bad Copy” claims that lot of money need to be put down on marketing a band or an artist in order to make them famous. I got one word for him. Basshunter. He became famous without marketing. What you need is a good song and people will listen to your music. And the comparision he is making with Bob Marley’s best selling album and Sean Paul’s and blaming Napster … It’s just weird.

The documentary brings up Nollywood. I really loved this part, especially their attitude towards copyright. They are talking about respectful copyright.
“We don’t want to look at things from a negative angle, we want to approach it from a positive angle and as we go along we remove all form of negativity“.
Greatly spoken. But why doesn’t the big companies in the industry apply the same concept? By trying to change the way they approach the market instead of trying to change the way the market approach them, they would both become stronger and earn more respect. 154 million Nigerians can’t be wrong!

Maybe this article also shows us that the internet is getting too big to handle. Perhaps it’s time to consider some legal changes?

Hi.
Recently I haven’t blogged as much as I should do. I am sorry for that. Also, recently I found out that there was a word-limit to the “triumph of the nerds”-post, so I realize I have to rewrite it. I will although keep the previous one so that no comments will get deleted. I will also write the 2 other blog posts this weekend, so stay updated! A little hint is that if you already commented my Triumph of the Nerds, you shouldn’t have to comment this one. It’s really the same, but a little shorter.

So, here it goes.

Noone at this time thought about the personal computer industry as a potential world-leading market. “I thought this was the most fun you could possibly have with your clothes on“, says some guy who worked for Microsoft in the documentary, which shows the importance of really enjoying what you do instead of just doing it for the money.

I think it’s funny how Steve Jobs critisize Microsoft for their lack of taste, but he also claims he has no problem with their success what so ever. It seems like he don’t care about the money, but the effect Microsoft has on people.

In the end of the documentary, the story-teller says “Apple, the company Jobs took from a garage to the fortune 500, is in trouble. It is now a fading force in the PC marketplace”…
I remember myself reading only yesterday at PingPong about 2 people who, out of everything in the world they had that they thought was bad, wrote Windows. And that they would, or had, changed to Mac. Somewhere, sometime.. Something happened. Steve Jobs came back to Apple 1997. Since then it has been a complete success. Ipod, Macbook, Pixar …

A documentary about how the personal computer-market started and developed. It goes from young hippies who started to build their own computers in the Silicon Valley in California, bankruptcy threatened calculator-companies in Albuquerque who takes help by Harvard-dropouts to get their new product to work, huge computer companies with dresscodes and company songs… To the garage hippies and harvard dropouts being multi-billionairs.

It basicly tells the story about two companies of today – Apple and Microsoft. Or – if you’d like to take it down to a personal level – two entrepreneurs. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.

Having seen the movie “Pirates of the Silicon Valley” I recognized most of the happenings. Like how Steve Wozniak started out in his garage building computers, and his friend Steve Jobs saw the brilliance and they started the company Apple. Well, that is very briefly how it happened.

Bill Gates and his older friend Paul Allen read about a company down in Albuquerque needing a software to get their computer to work, so they started making one. Bill realized the computer industry wouldn’t wait for him to finish college, and he therefore dropped out of Harvard. They founded the company Microsoft.

Noone at this time thought about the personal computer industry as a potential world-leading market. “I thought this was the most fun you could possibly have with your clothes on“, says some guy who worked for Microsoft in the documentary.

Later on, Steve Jobs bought the graphic interface from Xerox very cheap, since the Xerox board didn’t see the potential in the technology. Bill Gates stole this when being hired by Apple to develop their new software, and putted it into his own new software – Windows.

I think it is funny how Steve Jobs says straight out how he critizise Microsoft for their lack of taste, for not bringing own original ideas or not bringing much culture into their product. He claims he has no problem with their success, but with the fact that they just make third-rate products. And I can really see how he is thinking. Microsoft mostly steals their ideas and make them into product for a big range of people for a good price, while Apple focus more on style, but to a higher price for the customer.

In the end of the documentary, the story-teller says “Apple, the company Jobs took from a garage to the fortune 500, is in trouble. It is now a fading force in the PC marketplace”…
I remember myself reading only yesterday at PingPong about 2 people who, out of everything in the world they had that they thought was bad, wrote Windows. And that they would, or had, changed to Mac. Somewhere, sometime… Something happened. Steve Jobs came back to Apple 1997. Since then it has been a complete success. Ipod, Macbook, Pixar…

Finally finished a poster project I’ve been working on for the last months for Jönköping’s bandy team… I think the result turned out OK. Perhaps some posters worse then others, but, after all, it’s my first real “job”.

Here are some of them…

I found a very interesting thing made by DDB for Volkswagen Sweden. It’s about a thing called the “Fun theory”, and is there to make Volkswagen’s name in Sweden stronger. Funny idea to fix a piano stair in the Stockholm subway… Or to make “the worlds deepest trash can”.

It is on topic this week for making it into the first place in The Viral Video Chart list this week, which makes it the most commented and referated clip of all time. So I thought, why not make the lead even bigger.

Check it out on thefuntheory.com!

This is the first post of this blog. Actually the first blog-post in my whole life, except from some travel diary I had last year. I suppose most posts will look the same as the majority of the other blogs, since we are told to write about the same stuff. But I will try to give it a more personal touch, to make it more interesting.

I am kind of into advertising… So I think I will go for making some posts about this when it’s not school-related. Just to keep it updated.

This is an ad made by the Brazilian advertising agency DDB Brasil. It has been extremely criticized in the US lately, and considered to be “the worst poster ever made” and so on. I think it’s brilliant. What do you think?