TraceWorks is still growing like crazy, and we need your help. We’re looking for hardworking, skilled individuals to help us develop and scale our company and our SaaS product, Headlight. Want to know more about what working at TraceWorks is all about? Yes, please.

Technical Development

• Expert MS DBA & Architect
• Passionate C# & .NET Backend Senior Developer

Full-time employees receive competitive salary, paid vacation, health benefits, and a lot of excitement, fun, and love!

When you set a new account in Google AdWords you are asked about your local time zone. You are also told that you can not change it later.

Somehow a lot of our customers got stuck with pacific time which is pretty useless for companies in Europe. The obvious solution would be to call your Google representative, but (s)he will tell you that it can’t be changed.

Doing a work shop with the good people at Green People - the market leaders in the business of organic skin care I came across a way of changing the unchangeable: If you edit a campaign and turn on scheduling, you can set the time zone!

And for those of you wanting to change the time zone in Headlight: Call us and we will do it for you - no questions asked.

Recently during one of our Friday morning sessions at TraceWorks (50% bacon, 50% new ideas) we discussed the future road map of Headlight.

Obviously we get a lot of new ideas from our customers. We appreciate any new idea. Really, we do! But sometimes the ideas of customer just aren’t wild enough.

Simply because we want Headlight to go in new directions ideas discussed internally are much wilder than suggestions from customers. In these cases I don’t necessarily believe in user driven innovation:

Of what use, to Henry Ford, would have been a market survey of the pre-1914 demand for private cars?
J.C. Jones, Design Methods (1970/92)

In this presentation from Cannes Lions 2007 Jimmy Maymann provides a compelling story about understanding and mastering the rules of a rising consumer engagement and importance … there are paradigm shifting changes going on in the media space. You mr. CMO needs to get ready … or else

Check it out: http://www.goviral.com/cannes2007.php

..in hunting down a top skilled employee in the Danish rainforest. Meet Martin Høst Normark, a super dedicated web developer, juggling AJAX and .Net faster than you can say; “Cool interface”.

Martin started in TraceWorks this Monday, and will be maintaining and further developing Headlight’s already breath taking user interface.

For those of you fluent in Danish: The online Danish news paper ComON - a site related only to IT matters - has an article about our Lead developer Mads Kristensen.

The article is about Mads’ spare time project called BlogEngine.NET which is a open source blog engine written in dotNET.

Dependent on who you ask in TraceWorks the project either originates from Little Helper, from being annoyed about the supremacy of WordPress or simply the lack of useful blog engines for the dotNET platform.

If you want to read more about it, you can dig into the project web site.

Tuesday our new super backend developer had his first day of work at TraceWorks. His name is Christoffer – and no, it’s not Christoffer from our sales department who thought he’d rather develop.

But already at the first day of work Christoffer showed true TraceWorks spirit by eating roasted onions on his liver paste to lunch So perhaps there’s a bit of Christoffer from sales in him already…

Christoffer holds a degree as Cand Scient.Oceon – specialized in mathematics and economics from 2005 and when he’s not juggling with Pythagoras and differentials he’s living the outdoor life on his mountain bike or in the swimming pool.

Christoffer will be maintaining and developing data access and business object layers in close co-operation with our UI developers and DBA. Furthermore he will research in the possibility of adding business rules to campaigns in Headlight. He will try and figure out a way of automatically making A/B testing across all your selected marketing assets (keywords, CPC, banners, landing pages etc.) in order to detect the most successful combinations. So if it’s possible you can get Headlight to auto-optimize your campaigns for a higher CON% and ROI%.

I just emailed Pelle “100% TraceWorker” Jakobsen about a new Danish reward-based job board called www.mwr.jobs - which is actually pretty cool. I posted this job “Vanvittig (dygtig) Senior Udvikler med 100% ansvar for Front-End (C# & ASP.NET & AJAX)” - should anyone be interested.

Anyway Pelle is relaxing today and I received his Out of Office AutoReply. It looks like this:

The drama between Google and Microsoft continues. The latest move is that of Google grabbing DoubleClick from Microsoft for USD 3.1 billion (- which might be ridiculously out of proportions?).

Steve Ballmer doesn’t seem all that impressed with Google judging from this presentation he did at Stanford Graduate School.

I agree with Steve that long-term success comes from the ability to continually re-invent and Google hasn’t really done that yet (commercially speaking: 99% of their annual turnover is still from Search Marketing). But to ignore projects like Google Docs and Spreadsheets, Google Youtube, Google Earth, Google Checkout and just say that Google is simply about “milking one good idea” and that their long term growth strategy is “insane” is perhaps not completely true.

A just-in rumor is that Microsoft’s latest response to Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick is antitrust accusations arguing that a Google/DoubleClick combo will mean that they control more than 85% of the online advertisement space. Miscosoft is supported by AT&T and Time Warner in these accusations.

The next fight between these two giants will be over Yahoo - who’ll win?

drama2.0 continues…

Not too long ago our Chief Visionary Officer, Morten E. Wulff, was mentioned as one of the most talented young business men in Denmark.

Now he is also featured in “Berlingske Nyhedsmagasin” as one of the top 100 talents in Denmark. Even though the article focuses on all aspects of Morten’s work, TraceWorks plays a big role in this nomination.

Much to my surprise, it’s also mentioned that Morten is one those that fully understand the true concept of the web2.0 hype. Someday maybe even I will get the point.

Anyways - good job, Morten!