We - Anders L. Nielsen, Jimmi Nielsen, Jesper E. B. Nielsen, and Morten E. Wulff - A.K.A. the four guys who started TraceWorks, are happy to officially announce a complete buyback of our early stage / seed investor, Teknologisk Innovation A/S. It means that “we the founders” once again own the company 100%. A big thanks to “Tekinno” for helping us out in the beginning - may you help many successful startups in the future.

All four of us are still very much active with the company and after a 4-year-leaning-curve I think we now have the experience, technology, and a super-talented team to really explode in the near future. It’s going to be one hell of a ride!

A huge thanks to friends who made this possible!

“Codenamed “Project Panama,” Yahoo’s new model will be similar to that of which ranks search-engine ads by both the amount advertisers pay for keywords and the relevance of the ad. The Google-like algorithm should result in higher click-through rates than its older model that ranked ads only by the amount paid for keywords.”

“MSN’s adCenter, still in beta, may not be in the running when it comes to search volume, but apparently quality - as a result of the demographic data it uses - is trumping quantity, producing better results for advertisers than Google or Yahoo, according to yet another search expert, writes InternetRetailer (via MarketingVOX). “Were seeing better results on MSN than on Google or Yahoo,” Dave Williams, chief strategist of search engine marketing firm 360i, is quoted as saying.”

“After an 11-month run of uninterrupted market share growth, Google lost a small percentage of the search engine field in July, prompting some analysts to question whether the Internet giant’s dominance has reached its peak.”

All together I see some very interesting things happening in the Search Marketing industry. I see more players developing more innovative but also more advanced search marketing solutions. The result is a fragmented media space with a steep entry level.
Companies who understand how to maximize investments across all different search media using the many new advanced targeting features will win. The rest will loose.

Headlight will be fully integrated with Google Adwords on release September 21st. Our new API team will shortly after the official release focus on integrating with both Yahoo, MSN, and MIVA - in that order. You should see that happening quickly. This means one convenient platform to centrally manage all major search engines.

Down the road Headlight will also include some uniquely simple optimization algorithms which basically mean that your marketing campaigns (Banner/Paid/Affiliate) will be automatically optimized by the press of a button - while you play golf.

We hate complex and confusing situations. Just hate ‘em!!!

It’s time for you to join us at the OMD 2006 in Düsseldorf Germany - September 20 + 21.

Get your tickets here! It’s free to visit the OMD - and don’t forget to request the Afterparty tickets!

Join us and see how we solve your marketing challanges, from Marketing Planning, across Campaign Execution to Goal and Performance follow up.

Want a personal demonstration of our new solution at the OMD?
Book a demo with Christoffer Feldt-Sørensen now at +45 33 118 118 or email him at sales@traceworks.com

See you there!
(Booth #2C12 - Hall 2) - September 20 + 21

Software development is a pain in the ass (pardon my french). In the design crew we’re more or less down to tweaking details in Headlight. Our main purpose right now is to visually synchronize the various elements to present a coherent experience throughout the interface. Which as certainly led to the killing of a few darlings.

If you’ve ever had the slightest experience designing websites, or interfaces, you know how painful it is making those pretty little photoshop mock-ups into reality. You have to deal with all sorts of annoying factors like; what’s technically possible, cool but not very important details that will take four months to code, not everybody is using FireFox, the product actually has to make sense not just be visually pleasing. Totally unreasonable demands, that no one should ever need adapt to.

So what to do when all else fails and you’re facing these fatal decisions. Here at TraceWorks we trust our most important dilemmas to the ancient powers of the east. We ask a ninja.

After a good long struggle to finish up our new busines web application, Headlight, this is our final roadmap until official launch:

1. Beta2 - August 21st 2006
We’ll continue our closed beta test with a few selected high-traffic clients to fully test scalability, security, and 100% data accuracy.

2. Release Candidate - September 4th 2006
We’ll add a few more accounts and fully test the UI experience and focus on bug fixing while producing the last product documentation.

3. Official Full Release on the OMD in Düsseldorf - September 21st 2006

We’ll pretty soon be posting a more in-depth explanation on what exactly to expect from the first version of Headlight.
Note! Remember to come visit our stand at the OMD in Düsseldorf.

Want to take part in our private beta launch?

Read the full article on CNN.

Reading is sometimes just plain entertainment. I’ll never forget “American Psycho”, “Lord of the Rings”, and well “Harry Potter” - all very fun to read.

Reading is not always just entertainment, though. In many cases it is about getting smarter; learning new tricks; new perspectives on old tricks and so on. It’s kind of going to school – without the parties.

Only few people fail to understand that it’s important to keep learning. Wisdom and creativity is our most important currency – besides from “getting the job done!”

But many people need to discipline themselves to read and learn and just reading the subtitles of “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids” wont work. It will not make you wise, creative, and problem solving.
If you don’t keep up you’ll become a vegetable. This is is a fact proven by Russian scientist in 1918 in a small town just outside of Moscow … I’ve read it - so it’s true.

Facing this situation we in TraceWorks have put together a small library. It’s growing pretty fast with many different books; typically about something related to our line of business; software development, business development, designing UI, .NET / C# / SQL2005 / Flex 2.0.

I think what (both books / blogs) we read will to a certain degree define us a company why I think I’ll start posting about new books I find interesting.

I’m currently reading:

The Solution Centric Organization
By Eades, Keith M. and Kear, Robert

I’m part of the team in TraceWorks who is responsible for putting together our new communication platform.

“A “solution” is a mutually agreed-upon answer to a recognized problem that provides measurable improvement (value).”

The point is that we need to stop being to much product/price orientated! We need to THINK Differently, COMMUNICATE Differently, and ENGAGE Differently. We need to focus on designing the best possible SOLUTIONS. I think Headlight will be a good example of this and I want TraceWorks to become and stay an example of a “Solution Centric Organization”.

Authoritative and easy to use / read.

Interesting Web 2.0: The 24 Minute Documentary. One of the issues they address: “In a user generated world what role does a publisher have?” – Mike Arrington (TechCrunch).

I don’t think that the “user generated world” exist. I think it’s a small island the size of Bornhom.

User generated content is a fun and quirky supplement. But in the long run I really find most user generated content to be very un-interesting and boring. And I don’t see this changing.

Youtube for instance - 99% of the content is not worth investing valued time in. 1% is tolerable. All-in-all everything fails to be a serious contestant in the fight for consumer attention.

So, Mike Arrington, I don’t really see a “user generated world” now - or in a million years. I see a “user participation world”. I don’t think producers will loose any ground to user generated content so I don’t really see why the “role” of producers would be any different.

People want quality content available for free on-demand. “Quality content” is just as important an aspect as “free” and “on-demand”. What the hell is “content” by the way? Does a very personal journal on myspace.com filled with typos qualify to be “content”?

Microsoft is no. 2 and Google is only no. 24: http://bwnt.businessweek.com/brand/2006/

I thought Google would be no. 2 and Microsoft no. 3 (Coca Cola no. 1 - of course).