When you combine all their skills and talents together, the result is nothing short of Spectacular!

The Designer can take yards of regular old boring fabric and construct a beautiful dress, or suit. The Model possess the talent to wear the beautiful creation of the designer in a flawless and timeless manner. The Stylists make the model look like a Grecian God. And the Photographer is the artists who has a keen ability to capture an image of the stylist made up model in the designer threads, and make the image not just a new fashion trend but a work of art that transcends words.

Glamour Photography is an exciting business to be involved in. The hours are long and demanding, but the compensation is beyond words. The fiscal reward is usually very good, but there are other perks such as being published and garnering national and sometimes event international recognition. So, you need to find out where your niche in the world of Glamour Photography is.

Do you have an eye and a talent for putting different styles and fabrics together to make a killer outfit? Or are you always sketching designs for outfits? What about sewing, or alterations? If this is you, search out the designers in your area, talk to them about a possible apprenticeship. Contact an accredited Art School to see what kind of courses they offer in fashion design and merchandising.

Are you the person that all your friends come to do their hair and or make-up for special events? Contact your local hair styling institute. Get in touch with other hairstylists in your area that work with photographers for fashion shoots and get their recommendations of who is the best to work and train with.

Are you the tall, unfairly beautiful model? Get in contact with photographers who specialize in fashion/glamour photography. Maybe take some ballet classes to work on posture, and your graceful cat-walk. Eat healthy, and stick to a good work out regime to keep your body in shape and toned. Find the right photographer and stylist and get a portfolio together.

Do you like taking pictures, do you have an eye and talent for capturing even the most ordinary looking person to make them look like they just descended from heaven itself? Find an established, well respected photographer, talk to them and see if they would be willing to work with you; to teach you the ‘tricks of the trade’. Definitely invest in good equipment.

The photographer, stylist, and model should all find a reputable agent to help promote their skills and abilities. Make sure you network and talk to as many people in the industry as possible before signing with one particular agent. When you sign with an agent, you are putting your livelihood in their hands. You want to ensure that you have found someone who is
trustworthy and will go to bat for you.

You sign with an agent, you are putting your livelihood in their hands. You want to ensure that you have found someone who is trustworthy and will go to bat for you.

Consumers drastically view ‘permission’ differently than marketers. When asked whether or not they remember asking for email correspondence from a company they know and trust, only 10% of consumers replied that they had. More than half of respondents believe they never requested the majority of commercial emails they receive.

Why the amnesia?

This is the backlash that comes when the email marketing industry drowns consumers in sweepstakes, registrations, and in-store promotions. For some consumers, they’ve become increasingly distrustful when handing over their email addresses. One interesting piece of information to note is that the younger and wealthier a consumer - the more likely they are to feel they have signed up for the information they receive in emails. Also, having a professional landing page design will help in creating a lasting, positive impression.

Striking a balance in email marketing is a must. You don’t want to appear spammy to prospects, but you also want to make opting in an uncomplicated process. As you travel further and further into email marketing territory, it is important to understand the pros and cons of different techniques.

On a typical day, the number of non-spam emails that consumers receive to their personal accounts averages between 32.8 and 37.4. The numbers slightly dier when looking at men, women, and individuals (18 to 26 years old). With more people latching onto the social networking scene, some have predicted a decrease in email usefulness. To date, no such decline has been seen.

So if they can’t see that, then obviously they’re right. Whatever you believe, you’re right. You believe you’re not going to do it, you’re right. You believe you can, you’re right. I believe, and I’ve observed that successful people only choose those goals that are worthy of them.They see themselves as almost having a higher causal purpose. They’re in this world, they’re on this earth, they own this business to touch a lot of people. They see their purposeas to create jobs for a lot of people, to give people pride, to be responsible to help create dependable,secure futures for the families of all the people they work for. They see their job as to help vendors grow and prosper. They see their job as to touch so many dozens, or hundreds, or thousands, or tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of customers and clients, and improve their lives and impact their families or their businesses. And they’d say, “I’m worthy… the situation is worthy of me.”

The only reason I’m doing this is I see it is worthy of my goal. My goal is to be able to im-pact lots of people. The person reading this right now, I’m going to impact you. But not just you. I’m going to get you to see your full purpose. You’re going to go out and start impacting 1,000 or 2,000 more business people or customers. You’re going to impact their lives. You’re going to save them from pain and pressure and problems. You’re going enrich their lives and give them so much more outcome. You’re going to be able to take care of so many more people who you can employ. And families will be secure, and children will go to college and their whole fates and destinies will be improved because you set up an environment that stimulates them, and rewards them, and employs them.You’ve got to realize that you have a higher purpose. Your destiny and your purpose is somuch more than just eking out a living, just basically being an “also ran” in business. Realize thatyou have a higher purpose, and you should do nothing that isn’t worthy of that purpose.

Form relationships with your customers and your target audience in which these connections create value. The Internet is a web of networks inside of networks. Your marketing efforts, too, can form this strong network with every link and every connection.

In 2008, when many business and banks went down with the recession, Google announced profits rising 26%. Their strategy and model that got them there was by having an open network. Instead of controlling your content, marketing to bring in readers, and show them ads until your visitors leave, let the content be driven by your visitors and it will be linked to your main site.

It is this same openness, transparency, trust, and collaboration that has bred so many open sourced projects such as Linux and Mozilla Firefox.

Note that each possible link that you make is a distributed conversation which is happening at different places and in different times. Harness the interactive and collaborative prowess of the Internet.

In your marketing efforts, you may have experienced “banner blindness,” which is the ineffectiveness of placing banner ads at the top and throughout websites. Many visitors have developed this blindness towards banner ads because they are so used to seeing them.

Marketing not only has to be more interactive, but more importantly, it has to be social and collaborative. Many marketers are going that route and hitting up the popular social media websites such as Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter. But it isn’t enough just to buy ad space on those sites. Involving the customer or your target audience in making decisions, creating networks, and thus creating links between the company and customer.

For example, Virgin America Airlines has done this recently in creating a Virgin America Airlines fan page on Facebook and also Twittering about it. As a young domestic airline company, they ask the question to their target audience: “Where should we open up the next flying destination for Virgin America? Help us decide!”

This creates links and bonds relationships with the company, and also brands the airline as hip, cool, and trendy since they are using the same social media tools as the cool kids are using.  The company is not simply putting a static website as their homepage and driving paid traffic to their site. Instead, Virgin America is using these Web 2.0 platforms to launch their marketing efforts and involve their customers.

First of all, I want to pass along to you a formula that is quite ‘Old School’ and not as sexy as more modern Buzz Words - but one that serves me well even today.  What it amounts to is a bare-bones structure that will work for every ad you ever write.

1. Headline: If at all possible, grab the reader’s attention by appealing to a strong desire that you think he possesses. Again, I want to point out that it’s possible to grab the reader’s attention with just about any kind of startling headline, but, to the degree that headline isn’t directed at his immediate needs, you’ll have to be all the more benefit oriented very quickly in the copy immediately following the headline. If the headline appeals to the reader’s needs, it gives you a big head start.
2. Subheading, opening paragraph, or both: Again, your focus should be on trying to make the reader say to himself, “Hey, this ad is about me!” If you don’t accomplish this right from the outset, the chances are excellent that the reader will move on to the next page. People are interested only in ads that propose something that will be to their benefit. By now, this should be a great truth indelibly stamped on your forebrain.
3. Body copy (main text): State every reason you can think of why the reader should reach into his pocket and buy your product or service. Twenty reasons may not be enough. It may be the twenty-first reason that causes him to buy. You’re paying for every inch of white space in the ad, so do both yourself and the reader a favor and fill most of it with copy. The more reasons you can think of why the prospect should buy your product, the better your chances of selling him. Give it your best shot; it may be the last one you’ll ever have to sell the person who’s reading your ad right now.
4. Closing: Close the sale by (A) throwing in one or two parting lines, perhaps repeating your strongest selling points and then ‘Tell Them What To Do‘! Tell them ‘click here to buy‘ or ‘Join our Ezine Now‘. Leave nothing to chance, tell them what’s next.

Germany is big and important Web market, and in my opinion, having a blog named to be as “the most influential German tech blog”, or to be classified like “German Techcrunch” deserves much better price from that, especially with that annual income.

My opinion is that influential blogs are worth much more and with blogs, not everything is counted by pure math - like how much income it generates. In many cases, a certain blog is much more valued because of the influence it has

I will include here only winners (because winners take all :-)):

Best Application - Google Reader

Best Technology Innovation/Achievement - Facebook Connect

Best Design - Cooliris

Best Bootstrapped Starup - GitHub

Most Likely To Make The World A Better Place - GoodGuide

Best Enterprise Startup - Amazon Web Services

Best International Startup - eBuddy

Best Clean Tech Startup - Project Frog

Best New Gadget/Device - iPhone 3G

Best Mobile Startup - Evernote

Best Mobile Application - Imeem Mobile

Best Startup Founder - Evan Williams, Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone (Twitter)

Best Startup CEO - Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook)

Best Overall Startup In 2008 - Facebook

1. Don’t send immeditely you see some new section/site about your/your client industry. Find some time and read what kind of articles they publish, how they are written to see if they use more formal or funky style in writing, how long are the articles etc.

2. Go to the meeting with the editor. Many people never find time to see the editor of the certain site/magazine. They think it is enough to send a press release and content-hungry editors will publish it if they like it. Internet is great but don’t avoid face2face meetings.

3. Don’t send the same press release to everyone. Try to identify your most important media partners and adjust your press release and content of your email to them. It is not enough just to change the name of the recipient when you write Dear, [editorname]. Everyone likes to see that they are important, and also not many editors like to publish the same content like dozen of other media.

4. Don’t bold keywords and sentences in your press release. Editors are smart enough to know what is important and what is not so imporatnt.

5. Send objective news and not over-hyped press releases. Usually editors don’t want to publish over-hyped press release because they will sound as a free ad and not informative news and they won’t bother to adjust your press release.

6. Proofread your press releases.

7. Give a proper Subject name for your emails. Many people send press releases with blank Subject line or with the Subject line: For immediate release

8. Send your press release in the body of email and as an attachment. Because many editors won’t publish it immediatelly and they want to save the file somewhere, but some other editors don’t like getting attachments. Also, some local letters can be shown in error if sent in email because of recipient email client’s settings.

9. Don’t be pain in the ass. Once you sent the news don’t call every day and ask when it will be published. It is good to know what is the standard schedule for publishing and if you see that it passed too long since they got your email (in case of web sites several days) you can call them.

10. Give some benefit to journalists. Some exclusive information, product review or taking them to your company travel/conference or sponsoring their trip that can be later used in their articles is usually a nice thing to do. They will appreciate it.

Sorted based on dates

Internet Hungaria - premier conference about Internet business in Hungary, held at the Balaton, in place called Tihany - October 14th and 15th

Internet CEE - premier conference focused on CEE region, the first conference was organized in November 2007. Place and date of this year’s conference is Warsaw, Poland, October 28th and 29th

TMT Ventures ‘08 Zagreb - a New Europe Event, about Venture Capital industry, this time held in Zagreb, Croatia - October 28th

BizzBuzz - 3rd conference about Internet business, which is held in city in southeast Serbia called Nis, theme for this year is Content management on the Web - October 29th-31th

JavaSvet - conference about Java technology, held in Belgrade, Serbia - October 29th and 30th

View from the virtual world - conference organized by well-known PR agency in Serbia McCann Ericksson PR, held in Belgrade - November 1st

WebStrategija - 3rd conference called WebStrategija is held in Zagreb, Croatia, topic of this year’s conference is SEO - November 6th

Making a good search engine is very risky but can be also very lucrative business if projects become popular. Many companies want to make a Google killer or at least very good alternative search engine to the highly popular Google search engine. Definitely, the thing is that everyone knows that there is a lot of additional possibilities how search engine results and user satisfaction with the search results can be better and because many companies wants to make “the next big thing”. We will see who will succeed in that competition.

It is interesting to say that one of the premier VC companies DFJ (invested in Hotmail, Skype and other very successful ventures) invested in Edgios and also development team of the project is also based in Serbia.