Empire Avenue – Fun, cool and why it could be big

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2
April 30, 2011
Empire Avenue – Fun, cool and why it could be big

For the last year I have been hanging around on Empire Avenue (EAv). EAv is a website started in 2009 by a group of people with background from among others the gaming industry (i.e Electronic Arts). On February 23rd 2010 they launched a closed beta for “friends and family” with 250 players. Early in May an invite beta was opened and the number of players increased to 1000 before the service jumped out of closed beta on July 28th 2010, giving everyone the possibility to join. About a week later I jumped on the train and started using Empire Avenue. Here are some reflections after almost a year on the site. Oh, by the way, if you would like to invest in me, I am here: e(LARRE) What is Empire Avenue? Well, It’s a stock market game where you can buy or sell people that has a social media account such as Twitter, Facebook or an Empire Avenue account. Here is what the company itself says it is: “Empire Avenue is the Social Media Exchange, where you can buy and sell shares in any social media profile, meet new people, unlock Achievement badges, and earn boatloads of virtual cash by
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LeWeb 2010 – just a few photos from the event

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0
December 30, 2010
LeWeb 2010 – just a few photos from the event

Attended this years LeWeb in Paris. Big hype, much buzz and about 3000 attended the event. I am not going to write anything from or about the event but here are a few photos that I have taken. The photos is lisenced under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License Attribution: http://www.larre.com
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iTunes still loves my second-generation iPod. And one more thing…

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0
November 28, 2010
iTunes still loves my second-generation iPod. And one more thing…

I remember back in the summer of 2002. I bought my first iPod from Apple (on their Apple Store). If I do not remember wrong it was possible to pre-order it. I was really exited when it finally was delivered. It is a second-generation iPod, 20 GB, with Firewire, released 17th of July 2002. I have not used it for quite a while, but some tweets before the weekend got my attention to it. So I just had to check if it was still working. And of course it does. I was pretty sure that it would work, but I was more unsure if it still wanted to play around with iTunes. No worry it worked smoothly! No software update since I upgraded it many years ago – iTunes states that my software version 1.5 is the latest. It will check for updates though. I found out one more thing… If i put my iPhone 4 on top of my old iPhone 3G, they actually match my old iPod exactly when it comes to height! I do not believe this to be an coincidence. Nope.. it just can´t be Updated on May 27th 2011: Since I have found my photo
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Photos of U2 in Helsinki

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10
August 20, 2010
Photos of U2 in Helsinki

When you are in Helsinki what is better than to take some photos of old men – better known as U2? Well – I took some cool photos a couple of hours ago, here they are. But for the first time in 7 years I left my Canon behind…I only had my iPhone (how is that possible?) Both Bono, Adam and The Edge are taken close up, while talking to us and giving autographs. Cool guys they are! I hope they always have to sing that song… The photos is lisenced under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License Attribution: http://www.larre.com / CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
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Amazon S3 and CloudFront with WordPress and DreamHost

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17
January 24, 2010
Amazon S3 and CloudFront with WordPress and DreamHost

For the last couple of days I have been testing out the Amazon CloudFront service using my blog as a sandbox. My goal was pretty simple: To set up Amazon CloudFront on my blog, enabling static files like images and styles to be distributed for fast access. This post describes my experimentation with it. It is not just straight forward work, and there are different approaches you may choose among. So I thought I should write a short walk through of the steps that I have taken. If you wonder what Amazon CloudFront is, or looking for information on how it could be used in conjunction with WordPress this post can give you an overview and help you getting started. Let’s start with Amazon CloudFront and what this actually is. CloudFront is a Content Distribution Network (CDN). The service distributes your data out to multiple datacenter locations, ensuring faster access times. It works together with another service from Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service). Amazon S3 is a data storage service where your files is stored initially. To be using CloudFront for distribution you need to have a S3 account and store the files there. Setting up an
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Tough times for newspapers

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0
May 17, 2009

In the wake of the financial crisis, the debate around online newspapers and the traditional newspaper model for making money has increased. Today media companies have major financial problems. The newspapers are losing revenue in several areas; subscriptions are declining, classified advertising revenues are sharply reduced, and advertising revenues fall dramatically. The result is powerful cost savings in various editorial with huge layoffs. At the same time a lot of newspapers editions are shut down. Do you dare to cannibalize big revenues? One of three big revenues for the newspapers and the media companies was from classifieds. During the last 10 years classifieds has moved from print to online, but the newspapers underestimated the impact of the web and did not see the transformation. Robert Weisman has a great article titled ‘What went wrong?’ where he describes how (and why) The Boston Globe was a victim of its enormous success. They had the opportunity to put their lucrative classified advertising business on the Web, but cannibalization of their huge classified advertising revenues was out of the question. What they “kicked” out of office got picked up by TMP Worldwide and later expanded into Monster.com. One of the most difficult processes
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Why Google should buy Twitter

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8
April 22, 2009

Twitter is one of the hottest tech-companies on the web right now. The 3 year old company is reaching mainstream and is growing with a breath taking speed. Twitter.com grew 131 percent between February and March to 9.3 million visitors (US). It seems that they will pass LinkedIn in a very short time – just having Facebook and Myspace ahead of them. Real-Time A lot of attention is given Twitter in Media and the blogosphere. Read Write Web wrote and article back in January titled Sorry Google You Missed The Real-Time Web. They focus on the fact that Twitter is taking a place in the breaking news area, and that Google always will be late due to the nature of the indexing. Jeffrey Mann discusses why Twitter should not work hard to find a business model One of his key points is that Twitter’s value is in its content. He like many others focus on the real-time value of the content seeing this as the real value; Peoples comments, opinions and news; I believe that the real-time element of Twitter is an interesting thing to discuss in relation to how online news will evolve. But I think that the key
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The Norwegian web changed in 48 hours – how is that possible?

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24
February 23, 2009

On the 17th of February 2009 FINN.no – one of the largest websites in Norway put out a signal to all it’s Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) users (I’ve just taken the translation from an article in The Register, it’s about 99% correct translated) : Heads up: You’re using an older version of Internet Explorer. In order to get the most out of our website, you can get a free update of Internet Explorer. If you’re using a work computer, you should contact your IT administrator. Actually The register seems to have copied this translation from a blog post by Christian Johansen At the same time as we put out this message, we released a post on FINN labs (our public feedback and experimental area) which described in detail why we are showing this information to our IE6 users and also gave a list of alternative browsers. The code to display the message was also available. The background Before I continue let me say a couple of words about the background for this. FINN labs launched in September 2008 and we have published monthly browser statistics and focused on how the figures are for IE6. In January 2009 IE6 had about
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Google is changing the Yellow Pages Industry

By
7
February 4, 2009
Google is changing the Yellow Pages Industry

In the past years, Google has increased the focus on directory listings (yellow pages). OneBox is a product that combines links to paid content and ads with the usual information in the search results. The search is developed around the needs of the user, and are about to erase the distinction between promotional advertising and catalog. This challenges the established business models, and adding pressure on the industry. Personalized view of relevant content Google OneBox (pictured) provides a personalized view of relevant content of various types that match your query. The product is developed for several categories, including maps, travel and directory (Local businesses). In recent years, Google has entered into agreements with local directory publishers or players for access to quality content. This is packaged with content that is retrieved (or crawled) from many different sources on the web, in order to provide a richer search results for end users. Local Business Ads increases opportunities for advertisers in the directory The result of the Google directory is ideal for AdWords, the keyword-based advertising system that is the main source of income for the company. It gives advertisers the ability to link ads to place and industry (Local Business Ads).
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