The Randolf Jorberg Blog

It's along time since we last updated anything on weather.co.za but today I'm happy to add the most-requested feature:

Weather widgets are here! You can finally add a button to your homepage with the weather forecast for tomorrow. This means that your visitors don't need to visit weather.co.za anymore to see but stay on your site. You can add this image to any site you wish and we offer you three different versions (Image, PHP and Javascript). While we strive to add customization (color, size and style) in the future, we settled for one default style for now that is very simple and does not add any logo or advertisement to the weather information. The image on the left is actually just the life forecast that you can add to your homepage or blog right now!

That is not everything yet - you can also add weather.co.za data to your iGoogle homepage. Just click on this button and you'll be taken to your Google homepage where you can customize your weather feed:

As our old company logo (as seen on the left) needed a redesign we just started a competition on logotournament.com where we got 91 Entries until today. While we don't like all of them, we were pleasantly surprised by many of the others and would like to hear your feedback and suggestions on them.

Copy of our brief:

Company Name:

Fliks

Slogan:

What We Do:

We are an internet company creating, operating and marketing own, mostly community-based, web projects.

Our Industry:

Internet

Formats Accepted

.EPS only

Top Three Things to Communicate through our Logo:

#1 - Passion for internet projects
#2 - Internal unity
#3 - We're skilled and always strive for the technological lead

Our Target Audience:

Internet experts looking for the guys running this cool site/service.

Styles that we are interested in:

Wordmark
A wordmark consists of the company name in a stylized type and may include small asbstract or pictorial elements. Famous examples include:

Pictoral Mark
A pictorial mark uses literal or representative imagery to symbolize the brand. Famous examples include:

Please note that the above brands are in no way, shape, or form associated with LogoTournament. They are cited as examples under Fair Use for the enrichment of the general public's knowledge of the graphic arts.

Color Preferences:

Our company color is a bright red (RAL 3020, CMYK 0, 100, 100, 10) which should at least appear in the logo. Contrasting colours could be white, grey and/or black tones.

Our Ideas and Additional Information:

Our Ideas and additional information: Fliks has two divisions: "Fliks GmbH" in Germany, "GmbH meaning the kind of legal entity of our company in Germany. In South Africa, its "Fliks Media (Pty) Ltd." Fliks is a company that has very few customers and whose projects do mostly have their own branding/logo. Therefore, the fliks logo represents our company itself alone. The logo will appear on the web mostly on contact information pages, offline on businesscards and letters. Therefore it should be readable in small sizes, too. "Fliks" is a made up word resembling the german words "flink" or "fix", wich associates to "quick", "alert", "fast". Therefore the logo should represent a dynamic, fast acting, leading company in a rapidly developing IT/mediabased business field, competence as well als open-mindedness. Internally, it also should stand for our unity/community/alliance. Our core competences are SEO, Community Management, Web2.0, PHP/MySQL. We're hosting optimized, high traffic websites like the redirector service anonym.to as well as specialist (news)sites like the german mac magazine macnotes.de. As recognized by the company names, we also operate international the non-virtual way in germany as well as in south africa. Finally, we're in the internet business for more than 10 years now, therefore we don't want to be associated with new startups from the web2.0-boom. Ideas and recent logos: We always used "brackets" or symbols reminding brackets in our recent logos, symbolizing internal unity. Recent logo: visible on http://www.fliks.com Very old logo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/21075605@N00/3561930285/

You know that a company loses touch with reality, when it sues companies selling its own products.

3Gstore.de is a german online store selling the iPhone 3G without the usual Simlock or T-Mobile contract. They can do so legally, as they import the iPhones from other EU countries where the unlocked iPhones are sold to the public for prepaid customers. Therefore it's only obvious that they use Apple's official promotional pictures to sell the popular Apple gadget. Without any warning Apple sent 3Gstore.de a Cease and Desist letter, disallowing any future use of Apple product images and a 1780 Euro (2271 US$) bill attached for legal cost. Asked by german mac magazine Macnotes.de if other sites using their image material can expect similar costly C&D 'treatment', Apple Inc. only referred to their Image Use Agreement that disallows all image editing and usage in any commercial context, such as competitions or other non-editorial appearances.

To free itself and other blogs or websites from the risk of receiving such a hefty bill by Apple Inc., 3Gstore.de paid Photographer Lukas Palik to create professional looking iPhone 3G photos that are now also being licensed under the very liberal Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License, allowing editing and commercial usage. These Photos can be downloaded in the original Resolution from the 3Gstore.de Blog and on Flickr.

Alexa seriously tries do defend Google's recent data publishing attack (releasing Trends for Websites and Insights for Search) and stumbled across this ad on alexa.com:

The linked download is quite impressive. Not only the Top 500 (or country-based Top 100), but the top 1 million trafficked sites by Alexa ranking is now available for download (top-1m.csv.zip 9,5 MB Zipfile, ausgepackt 21,4 MB) and it appears to be recent data too (November 24th says the file-timestamp). This list would set you back 2500 US$ via Amazon's Web Services and unlucky you are only if you recently bought it or you work with MS Excel 2003 where you're limited to the first 65536 Entries...

Some observations about the content: Subdomains from wordpress.com, blogspot.com, blog.br, blogs.com and others are now counted seperately. While this might be old news to some I just observed it today as well as the fact that they do also seperately track it when your folder-structure contains a ~username (old UNIX standard used at some universities) or my.domain.tld/user/name. This also causes some errors, assome Domains using Feedburner MyBrand appear in the stats with their feeds.domain.tld/~r/ redirect URLs.

Beside these minor flaws just a sincere Thank You to the Alexa Team for this early christmas present

Also see my original german post about this christmas present from Alexa.

If you read my social network statuses around October 6th: I'm happily back in South Africa and I intend to stay here for all summer, do lotsa business and live life. I'm not alone anymore, but returning with my Girlfriend Scarlett and into our new house in upper Greenpoint that kept us busy during the last two weeks while watching the construction work for the worldcup stadium below us. I hope to see alot of you at our house warming party this Friday - nudge me for the directions if you wanna come...

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

When I split my blog into a German and an English one, I was aware that I wouldn't blog too much on the English one, while living in Germany. But I really didn't plan to blog THIS little, so I'm just trying to give you a rough overview what happened and what's coming up very soon.

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...

(via)

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 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 WeatherSA Facebook 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, London Airport, East London, Ermelo, Excelsior, Fauresmith, Ficksburg, Fort Beaufort, George, Giants Castle, Graaff-Reinet, Grabouw, Grahamstown, Graskop, Groblersdal, Hermanus, Ixopo, Johannesburg, Johannesburg OR Tambo Airport, 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.

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.