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A way to actually realize the synergies you usually only find in business plans and acquisition strategy papers is to internationalize successful website concepts. Since the transfer of students.ch to Poland went smoothly, the next project was the lauch of autofun.pl. This was based on the Czech concept from Anima Publishers (auto.cz, autofun.cz).

Based on my idea I introduced the project in Poland. A workshop with colleagues from Czech Republic and Poland was used to define all requirements, regarding content, concept, technology, legal as well as business. Part of the project was also the change of the platform (to open-source-based one) as the original czech version is running on a home-grown system.

Women are entering the internet. In fact, they already have conquered it. Times have gone where only tech nerds or (mostly male) business manager were using the web. And because the womens segment is the biggest when talking about advertising spendings, a lot of websites aiming for female audience have been launched recently. Axel Springer is participating, too. Besides the acquisition of aufeminin.com and the launch of MyBeautyCase.de there are also some activities in Poland. One is the people website koktajl24.pl, but even more fascinated are the Polish women by w-spodnicy.pl.

Here a product was started with an iterative approach which exceeded the traffic expectations by far. Planned as test only, the website is developing so well that the sales could start meanwhile. This project was implemented by the local Polish team again, I was only involved partly as consultant.

Just a quick update: Today MyBeautyCase is announced officially! The first project which was developed within our team. Completely from concept till launch. Of course with some external help. The project was headed by Antje Kowalewski, I was rather in a “supporting” role with some advisory and administrative support.

Another segment AS Polska is both experienced and successful are game magazines. Until now there were only marketing websites with little content available. However, especially in the gaming segment the audience is moving to the web massively. Together with Polish colleagues a brand- and product strategy was defined during a series of workshops. As the result, gamezilla.pl was born. Core content are news connected to computer games plus short reviews, previews and videos. Additionally, famous faces of the gaming segment are blogging about their favorite topics.

I was active during conception as well as in project steering and worked on the sales opportunities for this site.

This project redakcja.pl was one of the first ideas which was born indepentendly from any print brand. The concept and the design was developed by the Polish colleagues and realized with internal ressources. I was only involved partly in a consulting role, the implementation was done locally. A good sign for the know-how developed within the company!

One of the core business for newspapers used to be the classified advertisments. Mostly those where b-2-b was present: Used cars, real estate and job offers. Most of this business went online over the last years. In Germany Axel Springer met this challenge by acquiring Immonet and founding of a joint venture with Stepstone. The market for real estate is not developed in Poland yet, however the job offers are. So it was logic to establish a job board stepstone.pl. For the launch the innovative platform provided by Madgex was used which offered an excellent technology and a very short time-to-market.

I was deeply involved in that project, mainly during conception and mostly during selection and negotiation with the service supplier. Additionally I covered the internal approval process as well as participated in the talks with Stepstone as brand owner.

End of 2007 the planning of the relaunch for newsweek.pl started. AS Polska is publishing the Polish licence of this magazine since 2001. It was obvious to launch a modern website in addition to this very successful magazine. The existing website was more of a marketing site, running on an old system. That’s why we decided for a complete new approach. Based on the experienced of dziennik.pl and newsweek.com a new concept with a modern design was developed. During the conception phase several scenarios with different suppliers where checked. Finally a Polish company was selected. In April 2008 the decision for the implementation was made, end of November the new website went online.

I was involved as consultant and was member of the project steering comitee again. Mostly I was participating during the conception (including business planning), the comparision and selection of the development company and during the approval process in the headquarter.

After the acquisition of Amiado AG the strategic development of students.ch had to be discussed. The platform on which the website was recently relaunched was fully multilingual (as Switzerland itself is a multilingual country). The concept was proven and the track record convincing. An internationalization together with local AS-subsidiaries was a logic step. Together with the management of Amiado AG I developed this idea. A project was started to achive all necessary steps. Parallel I started talks with the CEOs of the local AS-companies.

Finally Poland was selected as pilot country. The main reason was that Axel Springer has a strong position in print and the market analysis was promising. Additionally we had a perfect candidate for the project management. In September 2008 we could launch students.pl. The development so far is excellent – only after 4 month it is already the fourth-biggest student website in Poland. So this was the first project where a product and a platform could be internationalized within AS successfully.

When I helped Mario to relaunch his website, the original job was to set up a homepage for his wife Antje instead. Although the launch of a website is quick and easy with WordPress we only managed to do the basic setup on this day. However, I am looking forward to continue with this site soon.

Already years ago I helped my friend Mario to launch his website. Like mine, it was written in bad HTML with a lot of animated GIF-pictures. More than two pages were never published. Probably not such a loss…

The homepage was finally planned to be relaunched in winter 2007. Of course I recommended WordPress. Together with Mario I did the basic installation and first set up. Again we managed to publish two pages in the first run. Let’s see if there will be more this time.