Five Funny iPad Things

1. iPad Mini:
   
   
   
2. Hitler doesn't like it.
   
   
3. No women in the iPad team?
   
   
4. Big iPhone:
   
   
5. The real iPad:
   
   
   
   

Ten Things I Learned in 2009

Inspired by my friend Herve, let's do a review of 2009.

This was a very important year for me in many ways.

Most importantly, I became dad in June. In business, a big change was from pure domaining to site development.

1. Big lesson: When you switch to development, focus on building up revenue, not on selling your site.
   Compared to selling domains with no revenue, selling developed sites with revenue is very difficult. Revenues and statistics need to be proven, there is limited capital on the market buying large developed sites, and end-user sales happen only if there is significant revenue on the site. We have largely given up trying to sell sites and concentrate on making money with them.
2. It's easy to build sites with a couple of thousand daily visitors. It's harder to achieve more organic traffic with repeatable processes.
   
3. The easiest way to monetize is still AdSense. Direct sales lead to much higher income, but require lots of effort and hand holding for customers.
4. I need to learn about more monetization options. For example our hotel bookings revenue sucks.
   
5. Becoming father is great for productivity.
6. Vienna is more fun than Bratislava (the girls are hotter in Bratislava, though. Since I'm married, I have to discount that factor).
7. SEO = getting back links (but I can sell you The Ultimate Guide To Get Your Site Ranked Number One for a special price, today only, of $99 $49).
8. I read the Four Hour Work Week only to realize that I already spend less than four hours per week on admin/boring stuff.
9. I learned how to change diapers, that babies don't really speak until they are a year old, and that I can live with 5 hours of sleep.
10. Finally... I want to get tanned in December too!
    

Five Predictions For 2010

Five things that will happen in 2010.

1. The Apple tablet will be the most interesting tech product of 2010 and be the same to netbooks as the iPhone was to mobiles. Apple shares will go to $300.
2. The economy will linger. Even tough in fact 2010's numbers will be worse than 2009's, people will speak of a slow recovery.
3. New TLDs will continue to be a hot topic (even though the first round will only be introduced in 2012) and the expressions of interest will show that there is serious demand from businesses. Nonetheless, .com will hold steady and we will see similar .com sales as in 2009 and 2008.
4. The already very small domaining industry will continue to fade out as domainers move to development, startups, SEO, affiliate marketing, etc.
5. The days of search engines presenting a page with 10 links are over and gone for good. Search engines will aggregate more data in more verticals, which will rock some industries (hotel and flight bookings, comparison shopping, and a wide variety of content sites come to mind). I'm sure there will be plenty of opportunities in this, but sure as hell I'm buying a lot more Google and Microsoft stock this year to hedge.