After a week in Boston, I travelled to Istanbul, Turkey to attend the Champions League final between Liverpool and AC Milan. The game was a blast that Milan set off by scoring in the first minute. After the first half the Italian team were ahead by 3-0. As a Liverpool-fan, I saw no hopes of winning. We had paid a lot of money just to see our favorite team lose to a much better team in the final of the worlds most prestigious club championship. We were disappointed but we sang along when the hardcore Liverpool-fans sang the famous song "You'll never walk alone". It seemed that the song revived the hopes of Steven Gerrard and the other Liverpool-player. The six magical minutes in the second half will stick to my memory for years to come. The game ended 3-3 and Liverpool went ahead to win the penalty shootout. The afterparty was affected by bad logistics planning by the Turkish officials. The roads to and from the game moved very slowly and most of the fans didn't get in to town until 3 am!

Affiliate programs are interesting. The idea is to reduce the customer acquisition cost by paying small sites to promote your own site and pay them on a cost per action basis. Examples of this are www.flysiden.no , www.flybilligst.com , www.bestepriser.com and more. They present existing information in a new way and earn money by generating sales for the companies that run the affiliate programs. A good place to learn more about affiliate programs is: http://money.howstuffworks.com/affiliate-program.htm

Today I testet Keyhole.com. It's amazing and scary. In the movies Enemy of the state and Minority report, we see how the government can track down individuals using advanced satelite pictures. This is now available to the general public through Keyhole. I tried it and I was able to see the cars parked outside the house I lived in when I went to PLU. Truly amazing. Google has acquired the service and will develop it further. Google's search technology combined with a powerful imagry service like Keyhole will be an interesting combination. If you add GPS on all mobile phones, anybody can see where you are at any given time. I need to read George Orwell's book, 1984;)

Yesterday I quit my job as Director of interactive marketing at Norwegian. It's been fun and I feel I have accomplished alot. During my time at Norwegian, we have:

• made www.norwegian.no one of the most visited websites in Norway
• increased the online booking percentage from 50% to almost 80%
• launched a successful e-mail marketing program
• reduced the response time to customers by over 150%
• become highly focused on tracking marketing campaigns
• implemented a new online booking engine that makes it easy to book airline tickets
• received recognition for being the best airline website in Europe (in Norwegian)
• received recognition from the Norwegian Consumer Agency for being customer friendly (read more).
• become visible in all the major search engines through organic and paid listings
• grown passed SAS Braathens(the largest airline in Scandinavia) in terms of internet traffic
• in cooperation with hotell.no become the major player for hotel bookings in Norway
• been invited to tell the story about the success of www.norwegian.no (read more)

My next job will be at studentrabatt.no ANS, a company I co-founded in 2000. Revenues are up and finally I can work full-time with my own business. To be continued..

Spring is coming. Summer is around the corner. Hiking is wonderful. I think walking stimulates the mind and brings new perspective on the world. Yesterday I met my mom to look at new cars for both of us:) Since neither of us really care about what type of car we drive, we went on a walk instead. A wonderful walk around a lake in Oslo(Sognsvann). After the walk, we ate lunch and talked. Today I bought a new baking oven. The new one is very nice, but I doubt that I'll start making alot of quality meals.