Niklas Hammarstr̦m РNews, Interest, CV

Last weeks I’ve been working with the quality on Testfreaks concerning new products and future categories. And a thing that hit me is the problem with product names and different markets. Since Testfreaks will be launched on several markets we need to keep track on product names on different markets. Same product but different names, and we need to know of this. By giving the product several names in our system we are making this possible, but still – why make this so complicated? Why can’t manufacturer just keep one name on the products.

Another thing that struck me is the lack of good images on products. The big manufacturer like Sony, Pioneer and JVC for examples are good. But most of them are really crap at giving good images on there products. This is particularly a problem with older products, the only good images out there are 100 x 100 this is not worth showing. Do anyone know of any good site with really good product images?

Internet makes the shopping more difficult since you can’t actually touch a product, instead we look at images and read good reviews. So if the manufacturer don’t provide good images, are we just going to skip buying there products? It’s a big focus on new products but there’s also a big secondhand market with consumer electronics, and they are also in need of good images.

And please, all manufacturer that use flash, remove all flash from your pages, since this is impossible to crawl in a good way and the site is much harder to navigate etc. Not to mention extract images from.

Sure, it’s very cheap to use freelancers on the internet but beware of the quality in there work. Of course, most of the people working as freelancers are very good. But as this market grows each day, a lot of non serious persons are entering the market. If you hire freelancers on the internet, make sure that they know what they are doing and they can deliver what you want before you start working with them.

Since we are about to launch Testfreaks soon, I’m handling all the quality checking (with help of freelancers of course). When I look at our competitors on the net, I see that they are more interested in having lots of products with even more reviews rather then a good quality. They have totally missed out on the quality in the service they delivering. On we want the user to comeback over and over again, because of the good quality in our service.

I talked to a friend that needed some help with his php programming and hired an Indian freelancer from one of the big sites. The prgrammer promised to deliver within five days, after five days my friend asked for the finished function but was told he needed another three days. This function was very important for my friend, since his site really needed this upgrade. Nothing happened after three more day, my friend had now lost two weeks of time. Two weeks are a long time on the internet if you should try to keep your regular users. My friend finally gave up and hired a freelancer that I recommended him, and got the job done on two days. Always beware of freelancers that promise a lot and have no feedback from old users. All the mayor big freelancer sites on the net show feedback of there users.

Good luck everyone.

Take a look at our new category page, camcorder reviews.

Last week I started up a new relation with an Indian company that will deliver operators to me. Earlier I’ve been very negative towards Indian outsourcing but I’m on my way to change all this. The Indian people and companies are excellent outsourcing destinations in some areas, and really bad in other areas. I’ve been handling outsourcing here for about a year now, and so far I only had bad experience with Indian programmers. But in the last couple of weeks I’ve been focusing on non programming outsourcing.

I had my first positive experience with Indian outsourcing business four weeks ago, when I hired a new Quality analytics to help me ensure the quality of our work. I told her about my former trouble with Indians, and she told me not to worry. This girl that I found is really good, she works hard and are very eager to learn new things. So last we I decided to test another company that will deliver operators (BPO) to me. At the moment there are two people sitting in Chennai, India. And it works really good!

I will write more about this later, at the moment my team are 20 people in 8 different locations.

I been working with a company in Kiev, Ukraine for about 9 month now. It was actually the first company that we started working with. Today they have seven people working with us, five programmers and two others. I can really recommend the Ukrainian people and the outsourcing industri in the country.

During the last six month I’ve actually had the pleasure to also work with three freelancers from Ukraine as well and they have all performed very well. They always communicate in good english, they deliver on time and they can think for them self.

I went to Kiev in february to visit the company and talk about our new platform for crawling webpages. It turned out to be placed in an old army building with guards at the door. But after the company owner had explained who I was I finally got to see the office. The entire company sat in two small rooms with computers everywhere, and the programmers was all young men from the Kiev university. But they where all very entusiac and with a lot of energy for the new tasks.

The time diffrence to Europe (+1h CET) makes Ukraine to a perfect outsourcing destination for big companies in Europe. The people are well educated and have good english knowledge. I can really recommend you all to try working with Ukraines.

Yesterday I returned to work again, after a short vacation (2 weeks).

Since Testfreaks are almost ready for beta launch (sign up here), there’s a lot of work to do at the moment. Most of my work right now is to ensure the quality of the data we are going to present on Testfreaks.

Hopefully you will love our new review service.

Today at lunch I was finally ready to start work, how is it possible to get that many mails and questions from my freelance team and other people? I was away for two weeks and my colleagues have done some of my work during his time. Still there’s a lot of stuff that I’m behind in the schedule (my own schedule).

Once again I’ve been disappointed when hiring Indian personal, they fail to deliver. So from now on I will never hire another Indian freelancer for work on Testfreaks. Instead I’ve started up a new long-term relation with a programming company in Xi’an, China. They help me with the Chinese part of Testfreaks.

Our plan is to initially launch Testfreaks in Sweden, US, UK, Germany, France and Spain. But there are more market coming right behind, hopefully Russia and China will be next along with Scandinavian markets.