It’s been great – but I’m also eager about getting on with the next few months at work. The pot is really cooking: TraceWorks is sizzling hot – amazing stuff is in the making. Wulffmorgenthaler is launching a new, awesome, and totally wicked website. My project portfolio is growing stronger and stronger supported by an ever-expanding network of super duper talents.

So bring on the crazy … and let’s make some metal fly.

From producing many different projects and companies I’m now also the proud co-producer of a child – a beautiful daughter. May 7th is the official launch date.

Merry X-mas to all our friends from the Wulffs – all 3 of us!

Pimalai Resort & Spa – 5-star luxury beach resort on Koh Lanta, Krabi with a direct access to 900-meter of private sandy beach.

Bye now.

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of visiting with Jake Nickell of Threadless “on location” in Chicago. It was awesome to get a glance of the company backstage and to check-out some of the new stuff they’re working on.

To the few people who don’t know what “Threadless” is all about here’s a quick introduction:

Threadless is a business which to an extreme degree is based on user-driven innovation or “crowdsourcing” – as many call it today. They use these techniques to make and sell T-shirts. Anyone can submit a design, then users get to vote on their favorites. The T-shirts that get the most votes are produced and sold online. Four to six designs are chosen every week from 600+ submissions to be printed and sold from the site with the winning designers receiving $2,000 in cash and prizes.

They’re doing a great job: Came up with a great – yet fairly simple – idea (which many people do!) but more importantly they executed this idea with so much energy and so much skill (which very few people do!) that “idea” quickly grew from a very small to be a million $ business. Well done.

I hope to convince Jake to do some projects together … that would be fun.
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This guy Frank Piller dissected a New York Times article on Threadless and found out that:

2000: Year of founding Threadless.

125: Number of submissions received by Threadless each day.

“Millions”: Dollars earned by selling T-shirts” not by hiring star designers but by asking anybody to design them.

Hundreds of thousands: Number of user voting each day.

6: Number of new T-shirt offerings per week.

1,500: Typical size of a batch of each new design.

2,000: Dollars paid to winning designers.

“Almost everything”: Number of items that sell out.

1: Number of Threadless stores, the first opened in the Lakeview neighborhood of Chicago in July 2007.

2.6 or higher: Score of most winning designs (on the rating scale from 0 to 5).

2.0: Lowest rank of a winning design.

x*n/z: “The final decision about which T’s actually get made and sold has always involved a bit of nonpublic number crunching. For example, Threadless looks at how many 0s and 5s a design gets; designs that inspire passionate disagreement often get printed because they tend to sell”.

1: There is a surprising degree of consistency — maybe even similarity — in the designs. “It’s a barometer of what’s going on in art and design right now,” Threadless director Kalmikoff suggests.

17: Number of winning designs submitted by Glenn Jones, a New Zealand designer.

should I listen to!? The list of speakers is rather long.

Since I’m deeply involved in marketing technology I should probably go check-out:

• Brian McAndrews, President and CEO, aQuantive, Inc.
• James Bilefield, CEO, Openads

And since TraceWorks is depending heavily on M$ I’m of course considering:

• Steve Ballmer, CEO, Microsoft

Web 3.0 is something I don’t understand at all so I should probably listen carefully to:

• Nova Spivack, Founder and CEO, Radar Networks (his blog)

I’m pretty involved with idea lab “Frank & Able” (stealth) why I think I could learn a lot from super star inventor (latest Metaweb):

• Danny Hillis, Co-Chairman and Chief Technology Officer, Applied Minds, Inc.

Who else should I learn from? What else should I do?

BTW: Anybody else going to “Web Summit 2.0″? Let’s meet-up, have a beer, and change the world.

I went there last week, I think it was. 5×5 km relay race with TraceWorks competing with our new big investor, Nordic Venture Partners and many of their portfolio companies e.g. Zyb, Polar Rose, Giritech and many more. It was fun.

My time was about 23 minutes. Well, some way I was a little faster – but who cares!?

First we said they were ruining their health with their bad habit, and they should just quit.

Then we said they were repulsive and we didn’t want to be around them. Then we said they were costing us loads of money — maybe they should pay extra taxes. Other People, after all, do not share their dissolute ways. Cigarette smokers? No, the obese.

Now it’s time to also include global warming to their record of sins as explained in a very sophisticated calculation created by some very clever guys (who probably have University decrease):

“The average weight of Americans rose by 10lb during the 1990s and what a new survey called this “additional adiposity” caused airlines to use a further 350 million gallons of fuel in 2000, at a cost of £149 million. This is hitting the environment with an extra 3.8 million tons of carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere”

Source: Economic and environmental costs of obesity by Dannenberg, Burton, and Jackson

What Can We Do? The Solution!

Scientists are of course working hard to develop a cure to prevent this catastrophe…

But most rational people point towards a more simple yet very powerful way to handle it. They point in the direction of a guy called Søren who lives in Copenhagen. He’s a personal trainer who’s dedicated his whole life to help people get in shape.

So if you want to loose a few pounds hence have a direct influence on preventing judgement day then I suggest you get in touch with Søren – either by phone +45 4037 0903 or by email srp@kropswerk.dk. Or you might want visit his website: www.kropswerk.dk.

Note! Since Søren just opened his new company a week ago you might be able to get some kind of attractive introductory price on some of the big packages: Especially if you say the magic, very secret, and rather long and difficult-to-remember password: “there-is-no-password-silly”.

New amazing gourmet butcher / delicacy take-away joint on Østerbro. You should consider skipping preparing food at home all together since Gourmandiet is a reality.

Damn! Just spend a fortune on a new kitchen.

Anyhooot … he’s still the winner of Tour de France.