If you feel like getting a bit of Danish culture when visiting Copenhagen some local stars shine brighter than others:

Places to see
Tivoli
The magnificent Tivoli Gardens - Vesterbrogade 3 - are a living confection of tulips, roses, and water features. When you visit, take time to enjoy the manicured beauty of the gardens, whose name is derived from an Italian town famous for its fountains. The peaceful lake is often dotted with ducks and swans, and live entertainment is offered most nights, ranging from theater performances to musical concerts. After dark, the light displays are incredibly beautiful. BUS: 1, 16, 29 goes there or you can use one of the many city bikes available for loan across the city.

The Danish National Museum
You can chart the origins of the Danish people at this museum, which is regarded as one of Europe’s best. Exhibits are divided into five distinct sections: Prehistory/Middle Ages to Renaissance, Palace/Museum, Royal Collection of Coins and Medals, Egyptian and Classical Antiquities, and Ethnographic (essentially, relics of Eskimo culture). BUS: 1, 2, 5, 6, 8, 10, 28, 29, 30, 32, 33, 34, or 35 goes there.

Amalienborg Castle (home of our Queen and her husband the Prince)/ Marmorkirken (The Marble Church)
Known for its Rococo design, this palace was built as the winter home for the Danish royal family and is actually composed of four individual mansions. Each one faces a cobblestone courtyard, and although they’re identical on the outside, all the mansions boast interiors that have been distinctively decorated. The royal residence since 1784, the palace currently has 12 rooms open for public viewing. Museum exhibits cover the period between the late 19th and late 20th centuries. BUS: 1, 6, 9, or 10 goes there.

…and, on the other hand - when in Copenhagen, do as the Copenhageners:

First of all, get a hold of a bike. The city is far better experienced by bike than bus, Metro or car.

Christiania/Christianshavn
Visit the last bit of hippie-Denmark at Christiania which is situated in the district of Christianshavn - The Danish version of Amsterdam’s channels.

From the walk and Talk meeting of Anders and Wulff today

Vesterbro
A bit dodgier than the other parts of the city but fascinating. Take a walk down Istedgade, from the Central Station and experience…ahem…different kinds of people. Also a good place to visit bars in the weekend (Vega, The Meat Packing District (Kødbyen), Bang & Jensen and many more)

Søerne (the lakes)
Built as part of the fortress of Copenhagen but nowadays a perfect place for a run, stroll or just for looking at people (primarily in the weekend)

Kongens Have and Rosenborg Castle
Relax in one of the best parks in the city with one of the most beautiful castles in Denmark - Rosenborg Castle.

Islands Brygge
Fancy a swim in the harbor? Then go to Islands’ Brygge. Really, really crowded when the weather’s nice.

Places to eat
Copenhagen is filled with many good restaurants. I have assembled a small collection of links to the ones that will treat you with an experience that will make you want to come back next year.

Expensive but brilliant, book a table if you can get one:

Restaurant Geranium
Kronprinsessegade 13
DK-1306 København K
Tel. +33 11 13 04

Restaurant Paustian
Kalkbrænderiløbskaj 2
DK 2100 -København Ø
Tel.+ 39 18 55 01

Restaurant Noma
Ny Adelgade 7
DK-1104 København K
Tel. +32 96 32 97

Restaurant Formel B
Vesterbrogade 182
DK-1800 Frederiksberg C
Tel. +33 25 10 66

Restaurant Kiin Kiin
Guldbergsgade 21
DK-2200 København N
Tel.+ 39 18 55 01

Restaurant King Hans’ Cellar
Vingaardsstræde 6
DK-1070 København K
Tel. +33 11 68 68

All of course have Michelin stars

I sincerely hope you will enjoy your stay.

Hey peeps how’s ya’ll doing? Thougt I’d give you a little “word” from “San Fran” where we’re attending the uxweek 2008 (and yea, that’s how they communicate here).

Things are “hella cool” (nor cal term for “nice”), (and nor cal is short for Nothern California… I should stop now shouldn’t I?). Yup, enough of the lingo and on to the bees knees.

I attended the Live, Vast, and Deep workshop about data visualization today. Which was conducted by a couple of guys from Stamen. In short, they kick ass (as Jeffery Veen said when I met him on the escalator after the workshop).

Here’s a few of those very hip gonzo journalism like iPhone impressions.

Design starts with pen and paper.

The Stamen guys makes some really awesome stuff.

Afterwards there was a party at the Adaptive path headquarters.

Gathering inspiration where ever we can. Marcel saw a poster at the Adaptive Path HQ he liked.

On my way home I saw this sign, although I found it a bit harsh, I got the message. (Taber means looser in danish)

Awesome isn’t it?… guess you had to be there.

I’m trying to do a bit of twitting, or what ever they call it, from over here. Doing it from my iPhone, that’s probably why I think it’s fun. You can follow my “live” ramblings from here, if you want.

I have waited the last three months for the 4th of August to come. But what’s so special about this day? Your right – It was my first day at Traceworks… I was prepared, I was excited and I was ready to show the Traceworkers, who their daddy is!

Now, I have been here for a little over a week and I haven’t regretted my change of job one little bit… The guys in here are great (yep, sad to say, but 95% of the employees are guys…). Not that I’m afraid of boys, don’t get me wrong, but I thought that mixed-sex offices worked better. My prejudice was not true. The DNA of the company makes a great atmosphere and it creates great people. Furthermore I have never seen people so dedicated to their work before. It makes it very easy to come as a new guy, when the staff is already focused on making a difference. I knew beforehand that the challenges in my new job would be perfect for me. But I wasn’t sure about the people in here. Luckily they turn out to be great…

So what is there more to expect from a new job…? The job opportunities are great, the people are great… well, all the rest of course… The food, the chairs, the laptops, the office, etc…

Again, I must say – I’m speechless. Yesterday all the staff got brand new Iphones!!! IPHONES EVERYBODY… how about that for a perk…! And the food is really great and there are red and green soft drinks for free… What is there more to wish for in a new job…?

Eiby – The new guy in town

A way to use your marketing budget is by sponsoring a TV show, it´s actually for some reason seen more and more. A TV Show of one hour would in average (for a Danish TV channel) mention your name / brand 3 to 4 times, in the beginning, in the end and after each commercial break, for a American channel would it properly mention you name 10 times within one hour.

I often see TV Shows with Gordon Ramsay since I love gourmet food. For those of you who don’t know the guy can I add that he is ranked as number two in the world, in terms of Michelin stars with 14 just behind Allan Ducasse. Ramsay is a master to use his brand and he is a brilliant chef.

The show I saw is called Kitchen Nightmares. In each episode, Ramsay visits failing restaurants which very often only serve frozen food or to say in another way no fresh food based on fresh ingredients at all. I wonder why there are failing, but Ramsey turns up and acts as a troublemaker by introducing new menus, new restaurant interior, tips and tricks so the personnel including the owner can act as top professional giving customers a good gourmet experience. So the essence of the show is all about how to make great food in a simple way and earn money, make a business turnaround.
What actually surprised or let´s say shocked me was the brand which were sponsoring the show. Take a guess….

A Frozen pizza (brand) … Dr. Oetker

Let’s take it one more time; we have a show which is all about how to teach people to make Good, Tasty and Fresh food instead of crappy frozen food.
I would really like to understand how the marketing person or the media agency came to this crazy idea? Imagine you have just seen how easy it is to make good, fresh and tasty food and Mr. Ramsey has just brainwashed you for one hour with the fact that frozen food sucks, what is the odds that you buy a frozen pizza next time you go the supermarket, properly close to zero.

The agency / marketing manager misunderstood the placement, the target audience, and the whole idea of doing effective and thoughtful media placement, I really hope that they are good at negotiating and buying and if anybody mention the fact that it’s a food product sponsoring a TV show about food, then again forget it, the placement is wrong, I believe that they haven’t seen the show?
The positive thing is that the placement has been removed, hopefully because a clever agency called Dr. Oetker and said “Hey guys you need some help here, you are wasting your money, let me tell you why”

Dr. Oetker turn you head towards online, I really believe that you can gain, at least can you measure how people interact with you brand, people can give you feedback regarding your product etc. etc.

Good Luck

Former Google employees have presented a new search engine by the name of Cuil - pronounced ‘Cool’. Coolness is rarely used about search engines (if you are not within the industry), so I guess the open question is: Will ’standard’ users find Cuil cool?

In these times where ’search’ equals Google, it might be a hard struggle but still Cuil offers some nice USPs:

• Cuil’s top-USP is that it indexes and understands the context surrounding each page and the concepts driving search requests
• Cuil is able to index the whole Internet (120 billion websites) and doesn’t use popularity to rank results as Google does
• Also, Cuil displays thumbnails in search results which some users might find useful
• But the biggest USP could be that Cuil doesn’t store records of users’ search activity or IP addresses. Again, this might sound tempting for some…

Time will tell if this way of searching is ever going to amount to a degree of coolness that could threat Google.

More: Brand Republic

1. Don’t be surprised if your appointment arrives on a bike - try to do the same.
2. The Danes are a straightforward bunch, they call a spade a spade.
3. Time on your hands at lunch? Grab a towel and go for a swim in the Øresund with the rest of the city.
4. Flying visit? Kastrup airport has excellent meeting facilities.
5. Our favourite Danish word is hygge. There’s no direct translation but the closest is “cosy”. Find your hygge place in CPH.
6. Forget taxis, the only way to explore Copenhagen is by bike.
7. For a real slice of Danish culture, we recommend you visit Christiana during the day.
8. Like Swedes and Norwegians, the Danish are very practical and like their Flemish neighbours they are refreshingly open-minded.
9. Forget air kissing, a firm handshake will suffice for him or for her.
10. Ida Davidsen serves the best open sandwiches in Scandinavia, and if you’re lucky, Ida herself will stop for a chat. Order the “Finn Ziegler”.

From Monocle

Population: 503,699.

Crime: murders, nine; domestic break-ins, 3,475.

Education: Copenhagen has a textbook network of state schools and universities.

Medical care: healthcare provision is universal - appropriately for a country with one of the highest cancer rates in Europe.

Sunshine: annual average, 1,670 hours.

Temperature: January average temperature 0C, July average 17C.

Wired: 147 public Wi-Fi hotspots.

Tolerance: Denmark legalised same-sex unions in 1989. Attempts to evict residents from the alternative enclave of Christiania have raised hackles. Let’s not forget relations with the Muslim community.

Drinking and shopping: alcohol laws are liberal, with bars staying open as late as their patrons demand. Shops adhere to a more rigid regime; most open around 11.00 and close dead on 18.00, while nearly all close on Sundays.

Public transport: the first phase of a metro system opened in 2003, with another two phases ready for this year and 2012 respectively. From April to December, the City Bike season allows you to release one of 2,000 bikes provided across the city for €2.70 - it can then be returned at any rack.

From the International Herald Tribune

Looking across my shoulder
I have come quite a long way since I joined TraceWorks in the middle of March. One of the things I spent a lot of time on in the beginning was reading other providers’ benchmarking reports. All seemed very focuses on technical or at least very specific information with wide disregard to the report as a whole or the message a report is meant to deliver. I imagined being a business executive or an online marketing manager when reading through them and although I had many “ah!” moments, they all left me feeling like a tropical saltwater fish in a freshwater tank.

I simply had to ask myself if it described what I needed and delivered the ability to focus my attention exactly where it was needed to get my ship back on course.

Captain’s overview
Where exactly is the important information. It does seem like much of the information available to companies are reports put together in a hurry and without any focus on readability or purpose. Either the focus areas is too wide or the information within the reports are simply not complementary to each other and leaves your business leader with a “so what?” look on his face while trying to decide if he needs to change his heading. Finding the exact areas that differentiate your boat from the race competition is exactly what you need from a benchmark and you do not want to spend 2 weeks doing it.

Plotting your course
If one is able to find any useful statistic in reports, then usually it is either not segmented towards the market space you operate in and leaves you with no clue on how you should adjust your own operation to meet the industry standard. It is simply not made for your type of boat, size of boat or it is made to cross the Atlantic ocean when you are merely interested in navigating the Bodensee in Switzerland.

We are all ships, we just use different crew and sails
The way I see it, organizations are dynamic entities acting within static environments and rules. All organizations have a structure with leadership and communication standards as well as routines when it comes to repeatable work assignments. Also organizations adhere to using tools and reports to collect data about their performance and capability. They usually compete with other organizations within a well defined market space using standard means of communication channels and selling identical product types. The organization/customer interaction all adheres to general economic laws and marketing models and thus the strategy set by organizations has a similar vantage point.

In short it is the unifying traits that interest me and how these are handled within each organization. We know what our ship is capable of, we simply want to know where the wind is coming from and how the currents are flowing so we can set our sails accordingly.

Navigating the information ocean
Thus I set sail to construct an easily negotiable map of online marketing divided into manageable categories that would each refer to specific static and unifying traits in organizations to display how different they are handled in comparison to their peer industry. This would give business leaders as well as individual marketing managers a well founded idea of exactly where they need to trim their vessel to reach the big red X of marketing excellence.

I am the weather forecast
What I have done is to construct a virtual corporate e-marketing identity profile for your company that you can compare to any industry or segment you wish. Over time this should hopefully become a dynamic trend display tool as well as a focus area identification tool. By updating data within the model over time as well as expanding the circumference of the data set, TraceWorks aim to deliver a trendsetting online benchmarking service that will allow you not only compare your performance in online marketing to your own goals and results, but to any industry segment you might desire.

Your compass & barometer
For each of the areas a comparison between your company and the industry is made and by clicking the corresponding area in the model, you will navigate to the report part that matters to your business management. The model and structure of our report will not only provide information that matters to your organization but also deliver an easy and useful tool to navigate the information ocean for any captain.

Benchmarking is thus as it should be. Helping you compare to whatever segment you want to and identify exactly how you are different. It is then not only possible to set your sails in accordance to your own strategy and plan compared to your competition, but also to identify exactly how the weather is going to look within the near future.

Just browsed my iPhone Google Reader news feeds this morning in search for news on the current Laguna Seca MotoGP.

Then this little Dell Ad pops up on my iPhone:

Question is: would I buy a DELL laptop?

Answer: NO WAY! Google wake up…If you want to plaster my news feeds with display ads, please do make it relevant (besides showing the ad in my local language)

Unfortunately I forgot to tab the banner ad to see if Dell actually created a specific iPhone landing page with full BUY now functionalities. More to follow when I see the next ad in my feeds…

UPDATE - July 20th:
Clicked the Dell ad on my iPhone. Unfortunately they did not deliver a great iPhone ready site and experience. The site loaded really slow and offered quite small images and text description. Yes yes I know I can zoom and so on, just hoped to see the first generation Dell iPhone optimized site from ad to check out. But I am sure I can expect to see this in the near future.

We’re delighted to announce that Headlight has had a major upgrade.

This time we’ve focused on 4 different areas:

• Creation of banner-campaigns - which now includes ‘expandable banners’!
• Maintenance and updates
• Google API integration
• General functionality

Without doubt the most anticipated feature is the availability of expandable banners. We’ve strived to make creation of expandable campaigns as easy as possible. Hence, you should feel comfortable in setting up these campaigns from the start.

Another apparent change is that maintenance news is now placed right beside user logon to inform you of future updates.

Furthermore our API has been improved to integrate with Google’s new version 12.

In addition to these major improvements general functionality from media-planning to drill-downs has been updated.

As usual more information is available on our wiki.