“TestFreaks have been growing rapidly during 2008 and have now around 4 million monthly users. In the fall of last year we scaled up the organization to sustain further rapid growth, however the global recession have had an impact on consumers buying less home electronics and other more expensive capital goods. This have also had an impact on our growth that during 2009 have been lower than planned. We are therefore reducing the team to a similar size as we had last fall. However, it is not a “Founder team”, we still have 8 employees in our HQ and global team in total of 35 people.”
freakhead_big
Testfreaks, a Swedish based product reviewing site has slowly been gathering attention. It caught our eye from ArcticIndex. Testfreaks can be summed up to be the aggregator of review sites. It pulls in material from more than 4000 sources from 27 markets and aggregates those into one rank – Freak Score.
Testfreaks has been put together by the founders of Pricerunner.com, Kristofer Arwin, Magnus Wiberg and Martin Alexanderson. The founders have therefore plenty of experience from the online shopping market, which Testfreaks is in also. Their business model is to get small commissions from sales done through their links. This sort of model understandably needs traffic. Last October they had about 2 million visits a month, and according to Anton they currently roll around 4M visits a month. Testfreaks has also received a $3 million investment from Northzone last year, according to VentureBeat.
There is plenty of competition in the social shopping market at the moment. In TestFreak’s case however, they mainly work with many of the other shopping sites to bring value for everyone. According to Anton Kuhta, who we had a little chat about the TestFreak site, they usually partner with at least one shopping site on each market to give their users the best possible price. They also work with other review sites – this is because TestFreaks brings in a lot of traffic to these sites so many want to work with them.
Perhaps companies that fall close by with TestFreaks at least from Finland are RunToShop and Fruugo. Both are some sort of aggregators and have similar kind of business models. It will be interesting to see how these companies will perform in the long run as social shopping is still an area that has yet proven itself. There’s definitely a need for more collaboration among these companies world wide – there are untapped benefits for sure.
How do you see this part of the social shopping market? Do you use sites such as TestFreaks when making purchase decisions? http://www.goeshare.com/2009/05/30/testfreaksa-excellent-web20-style-product-test-website/
2009年7月29日星期三
The review of Firefox 4.0
They’re only mockups, but they show the direction that Web browsers are headed, and it’s definitely a case of less being more.
Mozilla has posted to its wiki early concept designs for Firefox 4.0, and they show a Web browser doing its best to get out of the way of the pages it displays. The interface is decidedly minimal, giving more room for what really matters: content.In the first of several mockups of the Windows version of Firefox 4.0, the browser page tabs are in the usual place, atop the page viewer, but other buttons have been absorbed, with only the most important left on the interface.
In the second, the tabs are placed over the address bar, similar to the layout found in Chrome and the last beta of Safari 4. (In the final version of Safari 4, Apple returned to the more traditional tab location.)
In fact, users of Chrome and Safari will recognize a lot of design elements from those browsers,such as placing the refresh and stop-loading buttons in the address bar. But who knows how the final version will ultimately turn out? These are, after all, just mockups, posted for discussion.
Still, the overall trend is toward a minimalistic interface. And Stephen Shankland, writing in CNet’s Webware blog, appreciates that browser developers are giving him more Web-page real estate:
Mozilla’s ultimate goal is to make the user interface step into the background as much as possible — indeed, the mobile-phone version of Firefox now under development has no visible user interface until it’s needed. “Every time a user has to think about how to do something, instead of what (he wants) to do, we as software creators have failed,” said Aza Raskin, Mozilla’s leader of user interface work.
But it’s not simple to redesign the browsers. Users can be confused when interfaces change, some controls are essential, and hiding them can cause problems.
“The challenge to reducing UI (user interface) is in recognition versus recall. People generally use what they see,” Raskin said. “How can we provide one-click access to everything possible on the Web without also cluttering the screen? That’s a question we are still answering.”
I like these changes, but I also like the convenience of having buttons I use frequently at the ready — which is one reason why I really like the Ribbon interface on the newer versions of Microsoft Office.
Hopefully, Firefox’s interface will remain highly customizable in future versions, so individual users can have it their way.
How do you like your browser interface? Lean, or with all the right tools at your disposal?
http://www.goeshare.com/2009/07/29/meet-the-firefox-of-the-future/
Mozilla has posted to its wiki early concept designs for Firefox 4.0, and they show a Web browser doing its best to get out of the way of the pages it displays. The interface is decidedly minimal, giving more room for what really matters: content.In the first of several mockups of the Windows version of Firefox 4.0, the browser page tabs are in the usual place, atop the page viewer, but other buttons have been absorbed, with only the most important left on the interface.
In the second, the tabs are placed over the address bar, similar to the layout found in Chrome and the last beta of Safari 4. (In the final version of Safari 4, Apple returned to the more traditional tab location.)
In fact, users of Chrome and Safari will recognize a lot of design elements from those browsers,such as placing the refresh and stop-loading buttons in the address bar. But who knows how the final version will ultimately turn out? These are, after all, just mockups, posted for discussion.
Still, the overall trend is toward a minimalistic interface. And Stephen Shankland, writing in CNet’s Webware blog, appreciates that browser developers are giving him more Web-page real estate:
Mozilla’s ultimate goal is to make the user interface step into the background as much as possible — indeed, the mobile-phone version of Firefox now under development has no visible user interface until it’s needed. “Every time a user has to think about how to do something, instead of what (he wants) to do, we as software creators have failed,” said Aza Raskin, Mozilla’s leader of user interface work.
But it’s not simple to redesign the browsers. Users can be confused when interfaces change, some controls are essential, and hiding them can cause problems.
“The challenge to reducing UI (user interface) is in recognition versus recall. People generally use what they see,” Raskin said. “How can we provide one-click access to everything possible on the Web without also cluttering the screen? That’s a question we are still answering.”
I like these changes, but I also like the convenience of having buttons I use frequently at the ready — which is one reason why I really like the Ribbon interface on the newer versions of Microsoft Office.
Hopefully, Firefox’s interface will remain highly customizable in future versions, so individual users can have it their way.
How do you like your browser interface? Lean, or with all the right tools at your disposal?
http://www.goeshare.com/2009/07/29/meet-the-firefox-of-the-future/
订阅：
博文 (Atom)