Tomorrow is friday. The weeks pass by quickly. I'm heading off to Stockholm tomorrow. Spending the weekend. Might look for some apartments.. Nothing new. Had coffee with an old friend yesterday. We discussed all kinds of stuff. Very interesting..

I had an interesting experience with an intense customer today. The customer hand-delivered a complaint about a bug in the Norwegian booking engine. The complaint was sent to our customer relations department. They contacted me to discuss the issue. We sent a response, but the customer was not satisfied with the response. Since I was on vacation in Australia, it took quite a bit of time to respond to the customer. When I came I responded to the customer once again. He responded again and we had a discussion going. I went to Linkedin and searched for the customer's name. It turned out that he knew one of my connections. He also had knowledge about a topic where my skills are very limited. I used a random customer response in combination with a personal contact CRM connection to make a connection. I think it's interesting....... A lot of the people that use Linked in are so-called "sneezers", people that spread the word. Customers that complain really care. They spend their valuable time to complain about something... They're similar to the people that call the 1-800 number that's printed on bars of soap.. The type of people that call this number are really valuable customers..

One of the most frustrating things in professional life is working with people that don't care. Another frustrating is working with incompetent people that are not interested in learning!

Warren Buffet seeks to invest in companies where the employees have "ownership". By this he means that he looks for companies where employees are careful with the companies money. They don't spend money easily and they have a loyalty-feeling to the companies stockholders.

Last year a friend of mine told me that successful businesspeople often make presentations. I like to think of myself as successful. Even though I hate presenting in front of a crowd, I say "yes" to speaking engagements because I have a strong desire to be a successful business person... Is this a self-fulfilling prophecy? Anyway, in June I'll be presenting at a conference along with a lot of famous people! Not bad...

I'll also be presenting at a conference in Oslo in June. Read more about that here

The cool thing about speaking engagements is that I force myself to learn new stuff. Here are a few interesting sites:

http://www.womma.org/ - Word of Mouth Marketing Association.
http://www.bzzagent.com/ - A very interesting idea.

Back from Australia. It was a great trip. The trip took about 20 hours. I'm totally caught by jetleg and I woke up at 4 am this morning. We went to Brisbane, Sydney, Fraser Island, Herron Island (click on the link for more info on the islands) and Melbourne. Fraser Island is the worlds largest sand island. Emma and I had great time together and I'm planning to move to Stockholm pretty soon....

On the cultural side, we attended the opera "Carmen" in the Sydney Opera House. It was a very warm experience. The air condition in the building was not very effective. Here's some pictures from our vacation.

I did some reading on my trip to Australia. I finished up Victorian Internet, which compares the telegraph with the modern internet. Pretty interesting book that is light reading with interesting observations about innovation.

I also read a book about the world's most successful investor, Warren E. Buffet. His book, Buffett : The Making of an American Capitalist follows Buffet from his early childhood to the present day. His investing record is truly amazing and he has consistently beat the market the last 30 years. His successful investing style is explained here. It looks easy, but if it was so easy, everybody would be doing it. I like Buffet's down to earth personality and his ability to explain things in its simplest form. Simplicity is genious!

The final book I read through was a book about Richard Branson called Losing my Virginity. This autobiography introduces the founder of Virgin Atlantic, the successful low-cost airline that fought a vicious battle with British Airways. Richard Branson is a risk-taker that has succeeded(So far).

I just checked in at a hotel in London. Tomorrow I'll be attending some travel conference somewhere in London. The hotel has a wireless connection, but I have to sit down in the lobby to access it. Wireless networks are popping up everywhere. Soon we'll have wireless phones with direct always-on access to the internet. What will happen to the phone companies?

I'm reading the book Victorian Internet for the 3rd time. I covers the first real worldwide network; the telegraph. The book compares the telegraph with the internet. Pretty interesting to read how there were geeks and techies back then as well. Even more interesting to read how these technology freaks became absolete when the technology went from technology controlled to business controlled. We are seeing the same trend when it comes to the internet.

SMS marketing is getting pretty hot. Consider a medium where the advertisers pay someone to receptable for well-targeted ads. The recipient controls what type of ads they want to receive and at what rate they receive it. Wouldn't it be great to be able to let the newspapers and TV stations know what type of products and services you're interested in and then get paid everytime you viewed them? The term infomediary comes to mind. It's an old term, but a very interesting one..

I forgot to mention that I'm heading down to Australia for a couple of weeks. I've never been there and I think it'll be fun:)

I'm meeting Emma down there! What an adventure. My boss got a little upset when I forgot to tell her how long I was staying down there. I'm getting a little tired of my job. To much politics and discussions and not enough action. It's depressing to work with people that are more focused on going through the motions(processes), rather than worrying about the results. I guess it's a conflict in philosophies? What do I know?

Sometimes it seems like people are more interested in finding problems than finding solutions.. I wish I didn't care, but that's not part of my nature.

Well.. hopefully a couple of weeks "down under" will get me back on top;)