Amsterdam is one of the most beautiful city’s in the world. In my classification it’s simply the most beautiful (with second being San Francisco). When I’ve moved to Amsterdam around 10 years ago, I used to spend all weekends just walking on the streets.
Amsterdam is not just Red Light District and coffee-shops, its much bigger. It’s hard to explain what exactly is the magic of those small streets, you just have to see for yourself:
Some time ago I’ve written that webmaster is an obsolete profession. For any website bigger that 5 pages there is no persons who can manage everything – from content to software installation. Even if we’re taking about information website without e-commerce or huge database, there are still several steps, which one needs to follow in order to set information online.
Those are the typical steps in current a simple website management:
Step 1. Content copywriting.
Copywriting means you’re writing marketing BS and know about it Normally managed by marketing people without serious technical knowledge. This is where your ideas are.
Step 2. Content delivery.
This is mostly technological part.
I’ve seen in a lot of organizations that stop at with these 2 steps and they have a lot of problem. Marketing people and technical people speak different languages. They have different work agendas. In marketing they’re mostly managers and technical people are mostly makers. Click for a great article about managers and makers it by Paul Graham
There are a numerous cases when it’s not completely clear who should do semi-marketing, semi-technical tasks, like for example check texts for HTML-compliance or upload images on the web. Linux system administrator could say it’s not his problem, he has installed the CMS and it works perfect. Marketing lady doesn’t quite sure, what “upload” means.
Actually the picture should look like this
Step 2.5 Content Publication
This a very important step, which is not completely technical or marketing. The goal of this step is make sure the text written by marketing becomes web content and ready to join the Internet sea.
What kind of knowledge is required for this step. Obviously a lot of technical background but with a hint of marketing. The person must understand why we’re putting this on the site, not only how. Also he must be punctual, resourceful and stress-resistant. Publishing of 300-pages site can drive you mad.
Auggen is a small village on the German bank of Rein. It’s a part of famous white wine region. This region is divided by the Rein river to French and German parts. Before the second world war it was a part of Germany, but after Germany’s defeat western part become France. This part is world-famous Alsace region, very nice and making (allegedly) best white wine in the world.
German part of the same region is called Baden and is, of course, less known to wine-lovers. But the quality is the also very high.
Villages on the hills near Rein are very small, clean, full of “gasthaus“ (German type of bed-and-breakfasts hotels). They often have big wine factories where you can taste and buy some wine. The prices are very cheap and quality is superb! The most important that you’re sure about the temperature, at which the wine was stored. Which is crusual for the quality of the wine.
Here are some pictures from Auggen:
This is the second part of the article about online channels. In the first part I’ve tried to explain what does “building online channel from online clients” mean.
So, lets assume we have a standard distribution model. A few distributors, several dozens (or hundreds) resellers-retailers and we want to track which customer of which reseller has renewed his license a year later.
Sounds like no easy task and it isn’t. Let’s go step by step.
Step 1. Affiliate network. Every retailer should be also your online affiliate. Affiliates can easily receive their reseller margin from online sales – as affiliate kick-back. Also, only affiliate program (or something similar) allow to exchange data, required for this model (I’ll explain it later).
Step 2. Tracking parameters. Which parameters could be used to track customer via time and via Internet? Those are:
- e-mail address of the client. If we somehow manage to get an e-mail address of the client and link it to reseller, we can link any sales year later
- serial number in the software. In theory we can assign batches of serial numbers to a reseller and later check these batches in the e-shop, when client is going to present them as their old serial number.
-link in the software. This feature is specific for Kaspersky, but some other vendors have it as well. After some period of time the product itself will ask you to renew the license and conveniently give you a direct URL to the e-shop. In this URL we can place affiliate reference. Every client who manages to click it and buy the product, will be registered to this affiliate
in this case we don’t even need to link customers with resellers, we just need to link Master CD-Roms with resellers.
Step 3. Implementation
Master CD-Rom option. If we make a master CD-Rom and deliver it to a particular reseller, then the problem is more less solved. It’s the easiest method and doesn’t require any manual steps. The problem is that it’s very expensive to set-up. It costs a lot to produce a special CD-Rom. And general CD-Roms are printed for the whole distribution. There is no way a distributor can track which CD-Roms are going to which reseller, if the boxes with these CD-Roms are the same. This option is applicable for the big resellers, who can order and pay for 5000-10000 Cd-Roms orders.
Serial number tracking option. Again we have problem with mass production. Serial numbers are random (well, looks like random) and secret (they’re located inside box and can not be seen until client opens the product box at home). We can create (in theory) some another open consecutive serial numbers for secret several numbers, place them on the retail box and tray to track them via distribution. I’ve never tried this before, looks like too much work.
E-mail tracking option. This is one of the most interesting options, because it can be used with small retailers. There are 2 options to do it:
-collecting e-mails of users. Reseller is collecting emails from it’s users and supplying it to a special back-office (linked to his affiliate program). Later the e-shop registers any orders from clients with this emails as orders from this reseller.
-online registration via voucher system. Instead of serial numbers we give customers some cards with vouchers. Those vouchers could be exchanged for the real serial numbers via especial website (linked, again, to the affiliate system).
During our long weekend in Baden we’ve come to our friend in Basel. On Saturday we wanted to have a walk in a nice city for the whole day. Unfortunately Basel is not the best choice – the old part is to small, so we went to Zurich.
Actually Bern was our first choice, because the weather was not very sunny. And in Bern you can walk on the streets even if it’s raining. But on the highway right outside of Basel we’ve seen scary messages on big light panels: “Traffic jam to Bern due to an accident – waiting time 260 minutes!”. And they’re not kidding, Switzerland has just a few highways and when one of them is blocked - the whole country has a problem.
So Zurich it was. The last time I didn’t like it much. Too Black-and-white center, to few bars, very snobbish. But it was >5 years ago and I can say Zurich improved a lot. The walking part is much bigger now. Zurich has enormous amount of restaurants and (looks like) night life is booming. I was never fun of night clubs, but representation is so good, that I wanted to try.
But we had just one day and went back to Basel the same evening.
Here are some pictures on my Flikr account:
In this article I’ll mostly speak about Kaspersky Anti-Virus products, but it could be applied to other products as well.
One of the feature of modern Anti-Viruses – they’re keep asking for money every year. Traditionally all vendors provide a possibility to upgrade online, with some discount. For example, you buy a box with an antivirus solution for €40, it’s valid for 1 year. Next year you buy the “upgrade” license for €30 euro. The year after next – the same upgrade for €30 and so on.
When you let people to buy the discounted version, you of course want to be sure this customer had the €40-version before. You can do it by checking the serial number or activation code.
Everything seams logical and simply. But lets think about business part. Your retail resellers, selling boxes, may not be very happy about the fact that he sells the license once, but you (vendor) are getting money every year. And vendors are trying to solve this problem.
The basic solution is a special service, provided by some Anti-Virus vendors. If retailer sold a box to a customer, this customer considered as linked to this reseller. He/she is a part of this reseller sales channel. If this customer buys a license in the vendor shop, reseller can get some kick-back for the sales via it’s channel.
Somehow we must ensure that online customer belongs to this reseller, so its building an online sales channel.
Update: Part 2 is availiable.
Last weekend we were visiting Amsterdam with our friend. The last time I’ve visited in the Red Light District may be 3-4 years ago. There are definitely some changes. The number of windows with girls is greatly reduced. There is almost no windows left on the main canal streets, only on a small ones.
Dutch authorities are actively trying to reduce the size of RLD in Amsterdam. They basically want to make the city cleaner and nicer.
But what the dutch are going to do without hookers? I’ll tell you: they’ll be just fine. Prostitution doesn’t have any deep roots in Dutch society, tolerance does. In every coutry of Europe there will be some small percentage of males with special needs. In the Netherlands they can fulfill their needs legally, that’s it.
Red Light District and coffeeshops are not even in the list of things Dutch are proud of. (I’ll try to recall the whole list in several days)
But back to what’s left from the Amsterdam RLD. It looks like quantity was replaced by quality. There are much more nice young girls with great bodies. This may be due to:
For people wishes to learn more about the black bottom of Amsterdam, I recommend this website – Amsterdam XXX The walletjes ([R]-content) they have a nice FAQ section.
Interesting aspect of a starting blogger. You mostly speak with spam robots.
Actually, they’re quite good in conversation. They always talk about you and very laconic.
Here are a couple of examples:
All hail robots!!!