How long does it take to make 1000 – a thousand! – paper cranes and put them together to a huge zanox logo? VERY long – that’s all our zanox creative wizard Chris Loonan and his team of supporters said with a smile Now they produced a great stop-motion behind-the-scenes video of their project:

Absolutely crazy and fantastic work guys!

How long does it take to make 1000 – a thousand! – paper cranes and put them together to a huge zanox logo? VERY long – that’s all our zanox creative wizard Chris Loonan and his team of supporters said with a smile Now they produced a great stop-motion behind-the-scenes video of their project:

Absolutely crazy and fantastic work guys!

It’s been an exciting and successful year which is now coming to an end – but just before everybody heads out through snow and ice to meet family and friends for a couple of days full of good food, food and even more food, we would like to thank you all for a great 2010!

Instead of expressing our gratitude to all of you with a bunch of huge Christmas presents, we again invested in entrepreneurs in developing countries all over the world. You can learn more about the projects we supported and the whole idea of microfinance here.

The whole zanox team wishes you all a merry Christmas and a great holiday. We are already looking forward to another great year with you!

It’s been an exciting and successful year which is now coming to an end – but just before everybody heads out through snow and ice to meet family and friends for a couple of days full of good food, food and even more food, we would like to thank you all for a great 2010!

Instead of expressing our gratitude to all of you with a bunch of huge Christmas presents, we again invested in entrepreneurs in developing countries all over the world. You can learn more about the projects we supported and the whole idea of microfinance here.

The whole zanox team wishes you all a merry Christmas and a great holiday. We are already looking forward to another great year with you!

With Christmas business peaking these days, we would like to take the chance and introduce you to one of our latest exclusive publishers with an especially exciting business model: With friendfund, people can virtually get together via social networks, find and fund a special  gift for a common friend. friendfund is already available in the US, the UK and Germany. We talked to Harry McCarney, founder and CEO of the Berlin-based company.

The friendfund team

How does friendfund work and what’s your business model?

Friendfund enables friends to chip in for group gifts. We are simplifying the complicated and daunting process of group funding. The user creates a pool in three simple steps by determining the recipient, occasion, and gift. Friends are then invited through Facebook, Twitter or email to share the costs. There is no limit to how much each invitee should chip in and contributions can be made using Paypal or credit card.

How does the zanox technology support you for your business?

zanox’s product data currently forms the basis of friendfund’s product search. By working closely with zanox, we are able to give our users access to a massive product catalogue. Purchases of funded gifts are then made using zanox tracking links.

What are you looking for in advertisers?

We have found that, in some cases, product data tends to be incomplete or missing. We only use advertisers with complete and up to date product catalogs as we have to provide our users with a comprehensive and targeted product search.

What gift trends are you seeing this Christmas?

We have seen a clear trend towards experience based gifts like those sold by Jochen Schweizer. This is partly because they make such excellent group gifts. In general we find luxury, novel or exclusive gifts work better as the friendfund’s cost sharing system makes them much more affordable.

What’s in store for friendfund’s future?

We offer a white label solution and an embedded friendfund button which allow users to create gift pools from directly within a merchant’s site. This group payment method is currently being implemented in US, UK and Australian companies as well in Germany and will be very visible early in the New Year. Integration of the friendfund button is simple and straight forward and gives our partner merchants an instant way to place their products on social networks. Our merchants get great value from integration specifically because friendfund transactions reach out across social networks and become viral marketing campaigns for advertisers.

With Christmas business peaking these days, we would like to take the chance and introduce you to one of our latest exclusive publishers with an especially exciting business model: With friendfund, people can virtually get together via social networks, find and fund a special  gift for a common friend. friendfund is already available in the US, the UK and Germany. We talked to Harry McCarney, founder and CEO of the Berlin-based company.

The friendfund team

How does friendfund work and what’s your business model?

Friendfund enables friends to chip in for group gifts. We are simplifying the complicated and daunting process of group funding. The user creates a pool in three simple steps by determining the recipient, occasion, and gift. Friends are then invited through Facebook, Twitter or email to share the costs. There is no limit to how much each invitee should chip in and contributions can be made using Paypal or credit card.

How does the zanox technology support you for your business?

zanox’s product data currently forms the basis of friendfund’s product search. By working closely with zanox, we are able to give our users access to a massive product catalogue. Purchases of funded gifts are then made using zanox tracking links.

What are you looking for in advertisers?

We have found that, in some cases, product data tends to be incomplete or missing. We only use advertisers with complete and up to date product catalogs as we have to provide our users with a comprehensive and targeted product search.

What gift trends are you seeing this Christmas?

We have seen a clear trend towards experience based gifts like those sold by Jochen Schweizer. This is partly because they make such excellent group gifts. In general we find luxury, novel or exclusive gifts work better as the friendfund’s cost sharing system makes them much more affordable.

What’s in store for friendfund’s future?

We offer a white label solution and an embedded friendfund button which allow users to create gift pools from directly within a merchant’s site. This group payment method is currently being implemented in US, UK and Australian companies as well in Germany and will be very visible early in the New Year. Integration of the friendfund button is simple and straight forward and gives our partner merchants an instant way to place their products on social networks. Our merchants get great value from integration specifically because friendfund transactions reach out across social networks and become viral marketing campaigns for advertisers.

We just made several new microfinance investments, which we would like to share with you. We really hope that you like the idea and maybe even follow suit. This time, we invested in five different projects in Tanzania, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Kenya and Ghana.

The first investment we’d like to share with you is the business of Luis Alberto Vera Mite from Ecuador. The 27-year old has a three wheeled motorcycles, so called tricimotos, in the central market of the tourist area Playas. He has been bringing market customers to their homes by motorcycle for five years by now.  Now he would like to buy bodywork for the rear of his motorcycle to draw the attention of more customers. In the future, he’d like to have his own house and help his parents have a better life.

We also invested in Upendo Abdallah, mother of three from Tanzania, and her businesswomen group Mbogo, who are running their own charcoal business. Upendo wants to use the loan to increase her stock of charcoal so she can meet the increasing demand. Her dream is to open up her own charcoal shop one day.

Another bid we made is for Marlon, a young man who has established a small business selling technical accessories in Nicaragua. He started off just selling movies and music with savings from his job as a mason. Today he runs his own business, with the help of his wife. With the loan he will buy cellular accessories, TV remotes, calculators, movies, and music to augment his stock, improve his sales, and be more profitable.

And finally, we made two more investments in Ghana and Kenya: We supported Isaac and his business Rwanyambo Electronics to increase his stock of electronics and mobile phones, and Vivian who produces colourful African clothes. She needs to buy more fabrics and dyes, wants to engage more workers and even kick-off some advertising for her business. Vivian’s products are distributed to retail outlets in the major cities of Ghana. Customer demands for her clothes are increasing due to recent, nation-wide promotions of African wear.

We wish all entrepreneurs best of luck and hope that our bids help them to successfully develop their businesses!

It’s been a great event, if not even the most succesful Global Alliance Summit we’ve ever had: More than 140 guests and zanox employees from ten countries came to Berlin for the exclusive annual get-together of our top-partners. International advertisers, publishers and agencies gathered in the zanox Campus for Friday’s conference and of course many networking opportunities.

After the welcome note from our CEO Philipp Justus, our first guest speaker, the Dutch trendwatcher Vincent Everts, gave a great and inspiring presentation on latst consumer and technology trends. Following this, our CSO Chris Kleinsorge and Affiliate Window’s Managing Director Mark Walters gave an update on new collaboration opportunities for our partners. Chris also introduced three new zanox VIP Publishers: congratulations to TBG Digital, simpleAds and two bits and welcome to the zanox VIP Club as one of the most successful partners in our network! Mark introduced our new partner networks Affiliate Window and buy.at as well as new aspects of their service structure and technolgy.

We also had our CTO Daniel Keller giving a presentation about the next generation on zanox products and technologies, and Kimon Zorbas, Vice President of IAB Europe as our second guest speaker on online advertising markets across Europe. Last but not least we were pleased to have four great partners to share their business’ success story on our panel “Game changers and their recipe of success”: Fabian Heilemann, CEO and founder of DailyDeal, Lee Griffin, Business Development Director at TBG Digital, Robert Lang, Managing Director at Criteo Germany and Christian Vollmann, CEO of Affinitas, better known under the brand name of eDarling.

After the conference our guests enjoyed a great ride on traditional Berlin buses – and some very brave ones even took a seat on the open-air roof-top – to our exclusive evening location, the Meilenwerk Berlin. Before having dinner, our guests had the chance to explore the impressive collection of oldtimers exposed at Meilenwerk, and later on, also the chance to take part in a little race – with model cars of course And all those keen on some boogying were invited to Berlin’s new hipster club Asphalt.

All in all, we had a great time with all of you and want to thank you again for making this Global Alliance Summit a very special one! Looking forward to meeting you again next year!

The zanox Global Alliance Summit conference is still going on at our zanox Campus in Berlin and we are just about to start our panel discussion on “Game changers and their recipe of success”. For all of you curious on what’s been going on so far, here are some first impressions from today’s conference and last night’s networking events:

It is time again for ‘the best meet the best’: The zanox Global Alliance Summit 2010, the exclusive and international get-together of our top partners, will kick-off in Berlin tonight!

We have chosen the following title for this year’s conference:  “Evolution: Getting ready for the ‘new web’ – experience the most efficient market place with the zanox group”. The internet as one of the most important sales channels is shifting rapidly from a searchable to a social medium. Due to this development the continuously increasing online consumption and the market places are changing accordingly. Customers can be found more and more on social networks like facebook and spend more time there than anywhere else on the internet. Also the use of mobile devices and tablet computers is growing. New advertising formats arise and attract the mobile community more effectively. Therefore, all players in the online community – advertisers, publishers, agencies and networks – need to be aware of these emerging chances to stay successful. Following this, our sessions and presentations will deal with latest consumer and tech trends, challenges and opportunities for online advertising markets in Europe or the future of zanox and network collaboration in general.

For those of you who are interested in what’s going on during tomorrow’s  conference, just follow us on Twitter and we’ll keep you up to date! We are very excited about a great and inspiring Global Alliance Summit 2010 and about welcoming everybody in Berlin!