The Randolf Jorberg Blog

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We’re happy to announce that we’ve finally launched the new weather.co.za. We just started with a basic 5-day weather forecast service that gives you the weather for more than 90 locations in South Africa without the need to sign up for anything or deal with excessive advertising.

This site is just a temporary solution while we’re taking time to develop the final Weather site with international weather data, mobile access, widgets, email subscriptions, RSS feeds, and much more but this will take some months and we wanted to give you a proper site until we’re ready with this site. Weather.co.za is already visited by more than 400 Visitors every day. This is why we bought the site saweather.co.za and used their code and developed it into the current site.

We’d be happy to see you using and liking our first Weather site and welcome feedback in the comments or on the weather.co.za Facebook fan page.

The future looks bright for tech-startups in South Africa. My friend Thomas Promny sent me the news via email before I saw it on Jens Kunaths Blog (who also lives in Cape Town half the year) today: Hasso Plattner Ventures did just setup an 30 million Euros Venture Capital fund “aimed at early stage companies, not those within the seed stage“. This fits very well into my plans. I intend to invest some of the funds I got from selling gulli.com not only into my own south african projects (weather.co.za being only one of them) but also to help young entrepreneurs to startup their own online-based businesses. But being a seed capital / angel investor alone will not work if there is no infrastructure to support ventures that grow beyond that size and this could be where Hasso Plattner Ventures steps in.

My company in Germany has a proven track record for building high-traffic customer-oriented Portals in various niches and we’ll start using this experience help others to grow on the South African market as well… In March I’ll be back in Cape Town and I hope to meet the first potential partners, though I’ll mainly be there for some well-deserved vacation…

I did just announce publicly that gulli.com - the website I started in 1998 - was sold for an undisclosed amount. I expect the new owner to keep the main features and start developing new exciting extensions for it’s more than 600k registered members. Alexa says that gulli is one of the Top50 visited sites in Germany and Google Analytics counted more than 55.5 million pageviews from 9.8 million visits in January.

While I have to thank gulli for the existence of my company and an uncountable amount of experience and learnings I felt it’s a good time to say good bye after ten years of hard work on a single internet project. I will keep all my employees, hire new staff, move into bigger offices and use our experience in the internet-technology, community-management and online-marketing markets to build new exciting projects primarily targeted to the german and south african markets.

I hope to give you more updates here on my blog that was just recently moved from the old bi-lingual gul.li domain name to the english-only randolf.jorberg.com Domain.

It’s now more than a month that I arrived back in Cape Town and lots of things happened but I never got a blogpost ready to talk about these events.

Life here is as different (compared to Germany) as it is beautiful. While productivity is seriously decreased by the lack of instantly available internet-connectivity (Vodacom’s HSDPA is the best compromise I was able to find but it lacks speed and reliability to be used for VoIP and permanent connectivity), this wonderful people and scenery of Cape Town more than compensate for the problems I might be running in. Cape Town really is THE city in Africa to be, when it comes to Online Marketing. I was meeting old and new friends in Cape town, specifically at these events:

Podcamp Cape Town on the October 20th was great for me as a first-timer. I met Dave Duarte for the first time and had a great chat with Chris du Toit, Rafiq (of webaddiCTs) and many others. It’s good to see that there’s a vibrant internet scene here in South Africa. It was here that I first announced the aquisition of the domain name weather.co.za (still without real content) and that I do plan to develop it into a proper weather portal as soon as possible.

The 27dinner in Cape Town just a few days later really showed the size of the online marketing industry in SA. Around 100 people came together to have dinner, talk and listen to the well prepared presentation on user experience by Phil Barret and having to go through that talking thing myself by giving a short speech on my last 9 years in the online marketing world. I was happy to sponsor the corkage at this event so we could enjoy the wonderful Stormhoek Wine. This was a good opportunity to meet new people and I really look forward meeting and doing business with you again. After meeting oh-so-many people there (if I’d start linking and mentioning you, I’d miss out the other half of you) Marcus (of Capetownmagazine.com), Jayx and me decided to end that night at the fabulous Rafiki’s.

After some busy working days there are some upcoming events I’ll attend. First there is mobile and broadband conference AfricaCom starting tomorrow that I was lucky to get a press pass for and there’s the Geekdinner coming up on November 28th where I’ll be present as well. Too bad I’ll be travelling Namibia, when *Camp (aka Starcamp) hits the town December 8th and 9th. Before I go to Namibia, I’ll visit Johannesburg for a few days, and I’m happy to meet new people from the industry over there…

(Deutsche Version dieses Artikels von Korrupt ist auf gulli.com)

I just setup an auction at eBay (jump to the english part) where I put our profitable and successful (financially as well as traffic-wise) gullishare.com 1-click-webhost for sale. Why this step? Why don’t I continue operating this promising venture and bring it to huge success?
Nearly all the reasons for selling it are centered around my personal situation. I’m moving there and back between Germany and South Africa and growing my company’s german office as fast as it’s needed is not in my interest. When you enter a promising but competitive market as this one, you should not expect to be able away from the office for weeks. You need to be present 24/7, grow your company at a fast speed and you can’t concentrate on other promising projects.
I’ve talked to many colleagues and competitors from the one-click-hosting business. Their future looks bright. One-click-hosters are the most under-estimated part of the web 2.0 boom. They keep quiet about their huge success, because they do - opposed to most of the other venture capitalised web2.0 startups - already earn REAL money instead of burning it and have lots of visitors instead of needing to generate some virtual ‘buzz’ to gain visitors or outside capital.
Take a look at the biggest player in the market rapidshare.com: Rapidshare was originally started by German entrepreneur Christian Schmid at rapidshare.de and switched over to rapidshare.com (translation by Google) 10 Months ago and incorporated his sole proprietorship into the Rapidshare AG.
Today rapidshare.com is having the Alexa Rank 12 - that means that - following the alexa.com statistics - Rapidshare is the 12th most visited site on the WHOLE internet! I recently had Rapidshare’s COO Bobby Chang on the phone who confirmed me (as other routing experts did as well) that the technical details given on the webpage (currently 140 Gigabit/s of Internet connectivity and 3.5 Petabytes of storage, while it was only 120 Gigabit when we talked about it) are indeed correct and not only there for marketing purposes. This makes Rapidshare the website with the second widest connectivity worldwide, with only Youtube ahead. Are they earning or loosing money? You bet! Rapidshare.com doesn’t display any ads on their pages. They say they’ve got 35 million daily visitors (I wasn’t able to confirm that number) and advertisers are certainly lining up to show their ads on Rapidshare, but they do solely rely on the fees they charge their premium users. When speaking to hosting/connectivity experts you realise that even when getting the best deals available we’re speaking about monthly infrastructure costs substantially higher than 1.5 million Euros per month! What other online business can claim grabbing more than 18 Million Euro (25 Million US$) for digital services from their users per year?
Let’s speak about other competitors in the one-click-hosting world. You’d think that Megaupload.com is #2 with an impressive Alexa Rank 15 but I ask you to take their numbers with caution. We do have some insider details about this site that I’ll share with you later this week so I’ll stop for now by saying that they certainly look big and impressive as well.

There are dozen other competitors with lots of traffic. Most of them are very profitable and they are all growing. I know about one site who’s able to pay their monthly 40,000 US$ hosting bill without charging their users any ‘premium’-charges solely by using the open-for-all advertising-networks available on the market and still generating a healthy profit…
Certainly: all these huge competitors do not make gullishare a bigger website than it is. With ‘only’ 2.6 million pageviews / 700,000 unique visitors per month we’re pretty small compared to many others, but we’ve got that we’ve got a stable and heavily scalable solution and this makes it an attractive purchase for someone looking to enter this fast growing and moving market.

While searching for any evidence for my very first Google check I received in early 2001 (back when there was no Adsense) I found a mail remembering me of the very first online marketing conference I ever attended and probably the very first online marketing event in Germany.

From 13th-15th November 2001 there was the Internet Marketing Conference (IMC) (wonder that their website wasn’t changed since) organized by the Swede Lennart Svanberg and german online company luna-park. There was a maximum of maybe 50 participants, sponsorships from the search engines was unknown and the setting in the house-of-industrial-associations is probably unthinkable today.
The only german participants I remember meeting there were Ron Hillman, Stefan Fischerländer, Klaus Patzwaldt and Mathias Schmitz, while there were lots of english speaking participants (e.g. Dixon Jones whom I see speaking at all the us-conferences) from all over Europe back then. I keep on meeting many of these guys at every online marketing related conference-event today and it’s really great to see that so many new faces joined the scene since then…
I keeps on searching for the historic Google check, but the memory of early conference times is alive again - alot has changed in the industry and I’m excited to compare todays SEO get-togethers with the ones we’ll see in 2013…

Just a short hello to all the folks I’ve met so far and I’m hopefully gonna meet at this year’s Search Engine Strategies in San Jose.

I’ve just finished todays Webmaster on the Roof radio show together with Marcus ‘Mediadonis’ Tandler and many other guests. All guests and more background are on seofm.com. During the show a TV-Team from 3sat/ZDF appeared we were interviewed about Google and related subjects by Journalist Dagmar Hovestadt for a piece that will be aired on the ‘neues’ show somewhen in November.

SES was a very good show so far, but the real fun is just about to start soon. The Google Dance 2007 is gonna happen tonight and we’ve got a lot of partying to do. So far I’ve met too many people to list, but I’m sending special shouts to Thorsten ‘trafficer’ Loth, Marco Ciachera, Jill Sampey, Marcus Tober and Pascal Fantou.

If Matt Cutts says that the Googlebomb Problem was solved using a new algorythm that must be correct. After all it THE Matt Cutts from all-beloved Search-Engine Giant Google! Or is it possible that they lie to you? Why do they still claim that everything on Google’s result pages is still ordered by algorythms? Because it’s still done the manual way, they still don’t get the ’smaller’ language-specific Googlebombs like the case of ‘völlige inkompetenz‘ (complete incompetence in german) that ranks the austrian politician Karl-Heinz Grasser #1 when searching for it with Google:

funny enough: when the safe search is activated the politicians webpage does not appear in the Google results. Does it mean that Google thinks of this Politician’s (empty) homepage as an adult site?

There were too many lies about Googlebombing-Algos on the internet - hope that stops somehow soon. Google just started manually modifying their rankings on a massive scale and tries to hide that from their observers.

On a side note: the most impressive changes in the search rankings due to the manual anti googlebomb ‘algo’ was caused for the term ‘exit‘. Before Google shuffled the results the Top 3 spots were occupied by disney.com, Google and Yahoo, who’re linked by tens of thousand adult sites with an ‘exit’ button on their index page but that is gone by now.

SPAM / Scam mails are just getting more personal. This mail wasn’t catched by my spam-filter and cought my attention, because it’s the first spam mail that mentions my correct first and last name.

From: “LINDA SMITH”
To: (email address only used for whois)
Subject: Confidential letter to Randolf Jorberg
Hi Randolf Jorberg

RE: BENTLEY28722662/726-099Randolf Jorberg

I am delighted to announce to you an award from Bentley organization.

Via a computer ballot system conducted by Bentley as part of their Easter promotions for the year 2007, your name and email address came up in a random draw for a cash award of $300,000 (Three hundred thousand United States Dollars only).

Your award winning number is: BENTLEY28722662, ticket number 726-099. You are strongly adviced to keep your winning confidential. Hense contact your claims executive immediately to begin processing your cash award winning.

Mr. Robert West

E-mail: robertwestmail@sify.com

Please email the following details to Mr. Robert West your claims executive:

Your full name ,Your telephone number including area code, your cellular phone number (most importantly including area code)

Your fax number including area code

Your recent email address and mailing address (for delivery of your certified check)

Your reference number: BENTLEY28722662/726-099Randolf Jorberg

Your claims executive shall provide you detailed information about the promotions and also advice you on how to receive your cash award. Your certified check has been issued and currently with your claims agent hence contact him for further information.

PLEASE DO NOT REPLY THIS EMAIL RATHER CONTACT ONLY YOUR CLAIMS AGENT

Congratulations on your success in this years Bently promotions award

Linda

Regional cordinator

Data (including my full name) is obviously taken from domain whois data and I wonder what this spam mails purpose might be: simple data (lead) generation or is there going to be a follow up answer with some kind of phishing attempt? Anyone got the same mails?