See some of my coworkers in the IT-Dev-Room:

Another good thing is the location: 5 minutes over to the central train station, 5 minutes to get downtown, 2 minutes to get to our favourite bar and another 4 minutes walking to our favourite club… Couldn´t be better!

If you are around in Munich feel free to stop by.

There are also some news regarding our team: Britta and Birgit joined us on the first of March. Britta is our team-assistant caring for all minor and major problems except IT. And Birgit is just the opposite… caring for all minor and major issues only in IT. Birgit works as a Software-Engineer.

By the way, Tino got a new keyboard which he is really proud of. As Tino grew up in a small city (village?) in Franconia, he brought along his own dialect being slightly different to the way people pronounce letters like k and t over here. Therefore he was very happy that his new keyboard is in Franconia-style, i.e. no k and t but two times g and d… Edzadla

A little over a year ago I started Refined Labs, trying to revolutionize Online Marketing. After a little while and thanks to some great minds I realized that an office would certainly help as it would be pretty hard to employ people otherwise. Therefore I signed the contract for a one year lease for Refined LAB I.

This is what our superb lab looked like after a day:

During day 2:

(see the pizza box in front? )

After day 10:

After 2 months we decided that it would be time for a beta test of the office and invited some friends & family to “Refined Lab I BETA” at the evening of SES Munich 2007:

And then we just started to grow into our office, had a wonderful summer with plants from friends and now have a very cozy home for eight people:

And tomorrow will be our last day in LAB I before we move over to LAB II, where we’ll have more space. But before that we had to visit some of our locals where we enjoyed great food over the past year. Our favorites were: Man Fat, Café Altschwabing, Alter Simpl and of course Lo Studente, the best Pizza in Munich. Tomorrow at 1:15pm we’ll go there for our last lunch to celebrate the “Maxvorstadt farewell lunch”.

Overall I feel like the entire team loved this office and I personally will definetly never forget this great spot! On the other hand we have more than twice as much space in the new office that we can fill with presents from our readers.

Bye, bye LAB I - We will miss you!

Thomas
(with a tear in his eye)

Stephan and Melanie will raise SEM to the next level. Markus will support Simon, Jochen and Tino in the development division. Thanks to Andi, as far as I have heard, our servers are now running smoother than ever.

The new office is thus urgently needed and will be available in February. We will then be able to stretch our legs in 5 comfortable rooms. The only catch is that it is not within my walking distance any more and we’re not sure where to put the shared printer…

So far - stay tuned. More about our new office next time.

Well, that´s me I was born in a mid-sized town called Neumarkt, about 1.5 hours north of Munich, in 1980. After finishing school and joining the army for the cumpulsory 10-month military service I started studying law at the Ludwig Maximilians Universität München in 2000. Some years and plenty of parties later I finished with the degree “Dipl. Jur.” in February 2006, correspoding to a Master of Law. Until August 2006 I spent a couple of month in Australia, mainly in Sydney and on its beautiful beaches. After returning from Australia I started writing on a PhD on the Universität Regensburg - which still keeps me busy - and was working for the major law firm Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer for a couple of month. I joined Refined Labs in October 2007. My job is anything in common with figures and non-IT-issues.

Some words on what I do in my freetime? I love skiing! Things were a bit easier when I used to be a student as I could just take a day off whenever I felt like it. In the summertime I prefer going for a run or playing a round of golf. And of course I like going out. Currently a good spot to see me hanging out with my mates is Munich´s 089bar.

So far so good. Feel free to add my profile on Xing. Cheers.

Back in 2003 when I attended my first PubCon in London it was something completely different as I’ve never been to a bigger search event before, except a very small “Suchmaschinentricks Stammtisch” in Munich back in 2001 or so. The event itself was pretty unspectacular, drinking beer in a Pub, some guys standing on the bar and cheering to the folks. One of the most memorable moments was when Barry Lloyd from makemetop just said “Enjoy your drinks” and stepped down again. The rest of the event was dedicated to drinking and talking to people. Being 20 at that time and the first time on a commercial flight a few hours before, this was crazy. Basically it was all about networking for about 2-3 days.

Now I’m sitting on the plane again, roughly 4 years and 300 flights later and I feel like the world completely changed, at least the way search conferences behave. People fly to Vegas for a week to party, drink and go to sessions. Sessions haven’t been there in 2003 - weird. There are thousands of people coming (back then it was like 300-400 or so) and somehow everybody is excited and talking, sorry blogging about it. Rumor has it that secrets are still being shared and some people exchanged beer against Champagne, Jägermeister, Wodka or Goldschlager. Does this mean the industry has matured? I don’t think so, it just grew and the same problems are out there: Trying to be on top of the SERPs, but now there are way more people doing it, but we didn’t get so much more keyphrases. So we have to diversify.

Old school spammers became consultants or radio stars, former programmers became Spammers, former consultants became enterpreneurs and some just disappeared and rumor has it that they retired. But what does this have to do with PubCon? People are seeing PubCon differently. Whereas I used to go to PubCon to see friends, meet new people, drink, party and do some shopping it’s now a little more about business, getting things done and making sure you come back home with the highest ROI. This is probably also the reason why I’m doing one of my shortest trips to a conference in the US - 3 nights. Some might say this is crazy, some might say it’s effective. For me personally it’s both, but also a little sad and exciting.

I think the next years we will see even more professionalism going into the search industry. More structure in the way work is performed, more structure in the way it’s reported, measured and charged. But this is all because more and more corporations realize that search is todays direct marketing. I really wonder when the DMA or the DDV in Germany wake up and make their own search conferences. Considering how big these are (32 billion EUR spent per year in Germany on direct marketing) and what kind of power they have in terms of lobbying I think that they will make the big search conferences in 2012. They’ll have less drinking, more pitching involved, less partying, more booth work, less friends and more competition. Overall I’m not quite sure if I like this way from a personal point of view, but think that it will be a great step forward for a very young industry.

If you happen to see me in Vegas, please walk up to me and introduce yourself - right within the spirit of PubCon to meet new people!

After the API-team was able to solve some critical bugs in the beginning, the service now is stable enough to be integrated in existing system-architectures.

We already did that (and it works fine for us), because our customers deserve the most up-to-date products and services offered by Refined Labs.

Nevertheless there are lots of guys that are not happy with the new release, because their well-working-software is affected by the way, the retrieval of IDs for campaigns/adGroups/criterionKeywords/… is handled now by the various types of reports.

The API-team responded promptly to all the complaints and assured that there would be an internal talk about how these problems might be solved.

The important background-information is: It’s planned to shut down the currently running V10 in Feb, 2008.

I am very curious to see, if the API-team is able to cope with the current complaints till then and/or if the shutdown of V10 will be postponed and/or the users have to accept the effort to modify their existing software in bigger dimensions, and/or …

Tino

Btw: If you think about applying for a JAVA-job at Refined Labs, don’t forget to mention your perfect Nexuiz-skills. At the moment, the Java-backend has no chance against the Ajax-GUI-Guys

As this was really our first time we were exhibiting somewhere our booth looked rather basic, but playing Wii Sports (Thanks to guut.de) was definetly the favourite thing for all students at CDTM according to our impression. I think bringing some of the sweets (Knoppers, Hanuta, Lollies, …) was also quite appreciated.

The contacts we made, as well as the feedback we got, I hope that we can fill our job openings soon.

Refined Labs and Holtzbrinck eLAB, part of Georg von Holtzbrinck publishing group, agreed to a strategic joint venture for future developments. Holtzbrinck eLAB acquired a minority share in Refined Labs.

So much about the official part from our side. We are genuinely happy that we could find this agreement with an excellent partner that has a proven track record as well as great connections and expertise in this industry. We are extremely looking forward to work with them on creating tomorrows visions of the online marketing industry today. We went through lots of offers, possibilities and options in the last weeks and months and are confident that this was a good move for all parties involved.

One of our main goals was always to develop great services with happy employees in a fun environment. Looking into the office today I think that we achieved this goal so far and I am looking forward to welcome more great minds in our team soon. If you’re interested in joining, please have a look at our job openings.

So far I spoke at about 15 conferences this year in 7 different countries and can’t wait to add another 4 conferences till the end of the year:

- SMX Stockholm

This is one of my favourite shows as it’s usually small and intimate, so you get a chance to speak a little longer to some fellow speakers about what is going on in the world of search and where the future will be. Also I got some really good friends in Stockholm that usually take pretty good care of me when I’m there.

- SMX London

I’m not quite sure yet what I should expect from SMX London as it will be the first UK based SMX, but I am sure that Matthew Finlay together with Chris and Danny managed to get a great show off the ground. I’m really excited about speaking there and can’t wait till it starts.

- Suchmaschinenmarketing Seminar Zurich

Going to Zurich is always great as I can not only eat some of my favourite sweets, have lunch at Google but can also meet up with some non-German, German speaking SEOs and see how the rich country next to Germany is doing in regards to SEO/SEM. Also Roger is a really great host.

- WebmasterWorld PubCon Las Vegas

PubCon is a little weird this year for me. Usually it was always the starting point for a year end vacation in the US before the search marketing speakers moved from the warm and sunny desert to the cold and windy Illinois to speak at SES Chicago. Unfortunately this year they are pretty much at the same time, so I had to make up my mind on where to go and I opted for PubCon for various reasons. The main point is the quality of speakers, especially as I call a lot of them friends since 2003. The weather, good parties and Vegas itself sure help as well.

I’m really looking forward to meet many new, interresting people at the mentioned events and would extremely appreciate it if blog readers come up to me and say “Hi!”.

Now I’m finally off to Sweden in 50 minutes! Hej Sverige!

Thomas

Our new homepage should be able to give you a very good idea of our team, what we do and that we like it a lot. Most of you probably don’t know what we are up to and that is not a problem as we’re still figuring that out for ourselves. In the meanwhile we work on creating tomorrow’s visions today. This means that we look into various areas of the online (marketing) world in order to find areas where we can contribute to satisfy tomorrow’s internet users demands today.

Our main goal is to make our users and clients happy by providing a unique and perfect solution to their requirements at all times. We are currently debating on how to use this blog. Suggestions reach from posting Nexuiz high scores, pictures of the company lunches, industry news or just general stuff that keeps our brain busy and us happy.