If you can’t make it I’m sure I’ll see at least all Online Marketing Junkies of you at this months 27dinner

October 17th-18th is going to be a big day for the german online marketing industry. More than 8000 visitors are going to visit the leading online marketing düsseldorf (OMD) fair and afterwards more than 700 of them are going to visit the OMclub Party organised by me. This event is title-sponsored by Layer-Ads.de and co-sponsored by many well-known companies and friends of mine. We started small by planning an alternative party to the big and boring official party but were overwhelmed by the positive response from visitors and sponsors alike. If you go to Düsseldorf this year make sure not to miss the OMclub event!

We used this opportunity of so many marketing heads directed into our direction to give our newest project an extra boost. We aquired Macnotes.de (a leading German Mac and iPhone blogazine) in June and now decided to sponsor the OMclub event with an iPhone 3G 16 GB (without any contract or SIMlock) from 3Gstore.de. We think this is the coolest price you can give and just hope someone would ever give us a similar present… We hope that alot of webmasters will agree and participate in our competition, because this iPhone is given to the person who appears in the first spot on google.de for the keyword “Befreiphone“. Befreiphone is a made up term, that can be translated as “freed phone” so we want to show how useful an iPhone without any SIMlock could be. I’d love to have such an iPhone, as I could use it with my german SIM as well as with my South African Number…

Besides aquiring Macnotes.de we also moved into new larger offices in April, wrote a (real hardcover) book about 10 years with gulli.com and had a blast at the office opening / book release / birthday party early August.

Update from September 29th: The Befreiphone SEO-Contest was a huge success with circa 3000 blogs and mainstream media sites like bild.de or welt.de participating and the newly coined term ‘befreiphone’ gets more than 550,000 results with Google as of today. This and other contests created alot of buzz during the hectic OMD days for our OMclub that was a smash hit. With 1000 party-goers attending we grew bigger than anyone expected and observers blogged that the OMclub was more talked about than the actual OMD-fair we all came to visit… (Photos)

As you can see there is lots of business and partying going on right now in Germany and I’ll be happy once all this is over and I can finally return to Cape Town in October to concentrate on the South African business again…

This site is just a semi-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 build a useful site until we’re ready with the final 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.

We’ve currently got the weather data for these cities and places in South Africa:

Alexander Bay, Aliwal North, Badplaas, Beaufort West, Bela-Bela, Bethlehem, Bhisho, Bloemfontein, Calvinia, Cape Point, Cape Town, Cape Town International Airport, Clanwilliam, Cradock, De Aar, Durban, East London, Ermelo, Excelsior, Fauresmith, Ficksburg, Fort Beaufort, George, Giants Castle, Graaff-Reinet, Grabouw, Grahamstown, Graskop, Groblersdal, Hermanus, Ixopo, Johannesburg, Joubertina, Kimberley, Klerksdorp, Kokstad, Komatidraai, Kroonstad, Kuruman, Ladysmith, Lephalale, Levubu, Lydenburg, Mafikeng, Malmesbury, Margate, Mokopane, Mooiriver, Mthatha, Musina, Nelspruit, Newcastle, Ngqura, Oudtshoorn, Paarl, Phalaborwa, Piet Retief, Pietermaritzburg, Plettenberg Bay, Polokwane, Port Elizabeth, Postmasburg, Potchefstroom, Pretoria, Queenstown, Richards Bay, Riversdale, Rustenburg, Sasolburg, Skukuza, Slangkop, Springbok, St. Lucia Estuary, Standerton, Stilbaai, Strand, Sutherland, Taung, Thabazimbi, Thohoyandou, Tzaneen, Uitenhage, Ulundi, Underberg, Upington, Vereeniging, Vredendal, Vryburg, Vryheid, Welkom, Witbank, Worcester.

Please report if your place is missing in this list.

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…

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.

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…

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.

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…

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.