Official Blog

Here is what the zanox people have been waiting for since everybody returned to their home offices again after a great Aspen weekend in Poland: The Best of Aspen 2009 video, featuring the zanox teams from Berlin, Madrid, Milan, London, New York, Warszawa, Amsterdam, Paris, Stockholm, Shanghai and our eprofessional colleagues from Hamburg. Check it out and enjoy!

It’s been nine years to the day since zanox was founded by Thomas Hessler, Jens Hewald and Heiko Rauch. That’s why there is a great birthday party going on at zanox GAP Campus at this very moment – with cake, champagne and music! Here is a first impression of a happy Jens cutting the cake. Happy birthday everybody!

Many of us have worked really hard to make this year’s corporate kick-off event a special one: Today, more than 200 of our employees from all over the world will meet up for our yearly stragtegy meeting at the zanox Headquarters. After the big conference at our Berlin office,  Aspen 2009 will lead us to the town of Karpacz in the Giant Mountains, Poland. Following the zanox tradition, loads of snow and some exciting activities are an essential part of our trip which is meant for networking as well as exchanging ideas and knowledge. Presentations, bar camps, group works as well as fun activities such as skiing, snowboarding or sledging will keep us busy and entertained over the weekend. We can’t wait to see everybody again and look very much forward to a few days of creativity and fun! We will of course keep you updated on Twitter. Aspen 2009 will be a fantastic one!

zanox France took part in one of the most important French tradeshows this week – as a silver sponsor and speaker: The Forum E-Marketing, which took place on January 27 and 28 at the Palais des Congrès in Paris. Hundreds of experts were present to fill all the expectations of the 15.000 visitors on digital marketing, during two days of meetings and exchanges. With 200 exhibitors, 200 free conferences and eight training sessions, the Forum E-Marketing was a great opportunity for zanox France to show its own expertise: Especially the conference “Affiliation: an anti-crisis weapon”, co-animated by Guillaume Gélis and Nicolas Nauche, was a huge success for us. And for those of you who missed the conference, you can read a brief recap here (in French).

We are more than happy to announce that we’ll support the most promising European conference for Affiliate Marketing in 2009: the a4uexpo Europe. The educational and networking event will take place on 28 and 29 April at the RAI Congress Centre in Amsterdam and we’ll be there with an international team! We are very much looking forward to a conference agenda with more than 50 industry experts, workshops, panels and Q&A sessions. Of course you can also meet us at the a4uexpo Exhibition, which is an essential part of the event. We will keep you up-to-date on our agenda for Amsterdam and hope to see you there!

Huh? Everybody jumps up from their desks, looks out of the office window, blackberry cam in hand, and goes “ohhhh”. What’s going on? No, no fireworks – but an impressive red sky over Berlin. And here is the proof (no Photoshop!):

Romantic, isn’t it?

It’s getting a little quieter in the zanox offices: Most of the chocolates from our advent calendars has already been eaten and people are preparing for a couple of nice, relaxing holidays with their families, friends and loads of good food!

So we would like to take the chance to thank you for a successful year 2008 and to wish you all a merry Christmas!

As you might already know, we decided to stop donating and start investing in innovative ideas and entrepreneurship around the world this Christmas. From now on, we will help people who don’t have the chance to get financial support from a bank. Read more about our investment in sustainability here: www.zanox.com/sustainability

We are looking forward to working with you in a new successful year 2009!

Have a happy holiday and a fabulous Christmas!

It’s that time of the year again – and it’s time for a new exciting zanox project to kick-off. This Christmas, we decided to stop donating and start investing in innovative ideas and entrepreneurship around the world. From now on, we will support several social projects based on the idea of online microfinance platforms. Now you might be wondering what microfinance is and why we decided to support microfinance on a long-term basis – that’s why we prepared this nice little video:

We are very excited about the potential of online microfinance: Imagine a world where ambitious and innovative entrepreneurs are not dependent on the goodwill and random decision-making of big financial players anymore. This is the true web 2.0 spirit we believe in as a company.

And yes, the idea of microfinance might have been emerged in the context of developing countries, but it’s not limited to third world projects. Similar platforms have been founded in Europe to support European projects.

We’ll kick-off with 10,000 Euros, using different platforms and supporting different projects. For example we invested in Sammy Ngure Kungu’s cyber café in Kenya. Sammy plans to expand his business and would like to buy more computers.

And we supported the Nancy Patiño Menacho Group, an ambitious group of female entrepreneurs in Bolivia. The group members are involved in varoius economic activities such as cosmetics or food shops and internet cafés.

Of course we will keep you up to date on the progress on this blog and will soon introduce more projects we invest in.

We hope that many of you will follow us on this way and are now as thrilled about microfinance as we are.

Have a merry Christmas and a happy new year,

Thomas Hessler
and the whole zanox team

We just got back from a very successful ad:tech Shanghai 2008! The two-day event gave us the chance to maintain and expand our Asian Pacific network as well as to gain and share essential industry knowledge. This year, Jennifer Zhang, our Regional Director Asia Pacific, had been invited to take part in the Affiliate Marketing Panel. Jennifer was more than happy to talk about industry trends and show some best practice cases. The panel was part of the the ad:tech conference, which focused on the state of the industry, new technologies and the latest case studies. We also noticed that more and more international publishers show strong interest in the Chinese market.

And for everybody who didn’t have the chance to visit ad:tech Shanghai, you can watch a little video here.

Cyber Monday comes to France – finally! Cyber Monday has been one of the most successful internet events in the US for more than ten years. For one week, and on a website created just for the occasion, the big players of e-commerce will offer exclusive Christmas deals to French consumers. Created to serve as a “great deal gallery”, the Cyber Monday website will present the best Christmas products of each e-merchant as well as the special offers for their users - such as exclusivity, discounts, coupons, free delivery and much more. Cyber Monday will kick-off on Monday, 24 November, and runs until 30 November. Last but not least, there will be a big party on Monday, 1 December, in Paris!

So what do we have to do with Cyber Monday? Well, first of all, zanox France is an official sponsor of the event. But we do more than just that: zanox is dedicated to this project, so we manage several commercial, fun and festive activities. We also promote the website within the e-merchants’ network and help them participating in the project. And of course, we are organising some very nice surprises for the party guests on 1 December…

And for all our French-speaking users out there, here is a little fun video on Cyber Monday. Enjoy and hope to see you at the party!

It’s all about interactive communication: The IAB Forum, organised by the Interactive Advertising Bureau Italy, took place in Milan in its sixth edition. It demonstrated once more that online advertising is essential for almost all companies, and is able to serve as a business accelerator.

zanox, as a traditional exhibitor, has noticed a special spirit this year – with many merchants and publishers knowing exactly what they want and looking for collaborations. After two days and countless meetings with our partners – some of which included a beer or two – we collected more than 450 business cards and distributed more than 800 of our own.

We were really enthusiastic about being part of the IAB Forum 2008 and look forward to the upcoming zanox events. And for everybody who missed the chance to drop by our bright 30 square meter stand in our traditional colours black and orange, we took some nice pics of the IAB Forum 2008. Enjoy!

Once again the biggest show in New York was a huge success for zanox. After having collected hundreds of potential leads and publisher contacts, zanox USA is now off to a “big apple” start! We met with some of our biggest clients, and also put faces to some new potential ones as well.

To be in the big city during the election week and having witnessed the positive energy and flair among zanox’s fellow publisher community, I feel there is a new sense of hope and continued dedication within the US towards affiliate marketing. In contrast to what predictions may portray during these unstable financial times, I see the continued optimism and drive within the industry. I know zanox will continue to do its best monetizing the internet and taking care that we are doing our best to bring global offers to our publisher base. I look forward to the end of 2008, but I am even more energetic to see what in 2009 the affiliate marketing arena brings.

On 24th October 2008 the zanox GAP Campus hosted another great event: the zanox Web Services Contest Finale – Night of Innovations 2008.

More than 200 people – contest participants and supporters, investors, online marketers, web 2.0 fans and zanoxees – excitingly awaited the announcement of the winners. Servtag, Webtrekk and triboo were the lucky ones!

In a relaxed atmosphere people talked not only about the 3 winning teams but enjoyed drinks and snacks along with the ‘RoboCup’, a live soccer performance by Freie Universität robots.

For more details on the top 10 contest teams and the contest itself visit our Web Services blog.

Here some impressions from the event:

Join us for a night of innovation and networking at the zanox GAP Campus on 24th October 2008 starting at 19:30h.

Celebrate the winners of the 1 Million Euro Web Services contest together with investors, innovators and opinion leaders from the web 2.0 and online marketing scene. Learn more about the latest applications and watch robots play soccer.

For more information and registration click here.

We just received a note from one of our partners on how he uses the zanox Beach Towel – this one even made it to Hong Kong. Have a look!

‘I just wanted to drop you a quick note to thank you for the beautiful zanox beach towels.

Today in Hong Kong and China is the National Day public holiday and in many other parts of Asia its Eid al-Fitr (think I have the spelling right?).

We took the opportunity today to head to the beach with the kids and some friends. The Zanox beach towels got their first outing today. Here is a quick piccie of it in action.’

If you would like to show the world how you use the zanox Beach Towel please send an email to Alexandra Lilienthal at zanox Marketing.

The readers of the popular webzine deutsche-startups.de and a professional jury consisting of journalists and internet experts appointed Lars Hinrichs of Xing.com to be the most important German internet entrepreneur – for now. Lars started his business networking platform in 2003 and went public in 2006. Congratulations to Hamburg from the zanox HQs!

No surprise to us and the zanox community, our CEO and co-founder Thomas Hessler, was also voted into the top ten and came in sixth in the overall ranking. In the category “Success” Thomas has even been ranked second by the jury.
Thanks to Alex and Christina from deutsche-startups – we are looking forward to next year’s ranking.

In the zanox tradition employees participated in an internal prediction game for this year’s soccer championship. 67 zanoxees from Berlin, Hamburg, Paris, Shanghai, New York, Italy and others cheered and hoped for their favourite team to win the UEFA Euro 2008.

Even though the German team only came in second place a German zanoxee succeeded! Andreas Vogel from the Berlin Sales Department is the lucky winner of a great and fun beer tab. Sebastian Wallroth from the Berlin Monetization 2.0 team – organiser of the prediction game – handed over the prize and was the first to congratulate Andreas.

Look out for Andreas’ next party!

Yesterday we had our first official event after the opening party in our new Campus facilities here at zanox Berlin. We invited all our international PR agencies over for the second annual “Global PR Day” and briefed them on strategy, objectives, product road maps and online PR initiatives. In total we had 11 colleagues from 10 agencies over, covering Germany, Switzerland, Austria, UK, France, Italy, Spain, USA, Poland, Denmark and Sweden. It was fantastic to see such a great spirit in the guys and they left fully motivated and re-charged to get the zanox messages out there

The last PR day in Berlin was held in winter, so I believe everybody was quite pleased that we have decided for summer weather with bright blue sky and temperatures above 25 degrees this time. Berlin in the summer is simply a totally different city!. From the chilled Ellington Hotel we went to Spindler & Klatt next to the river Spree and had a pretty cool dinner and relaxing night on the terrace as you can see on the pics (hopefully more to come soonish). Not only because of that I think we will extend the event to two days next time, as one day proofed to be quite ambitious to cover all the subjects and workshops.

Looking forward to seeing you soon and the forthcoming coverage
Cheers
Uwe

Christopher Dessi, VP of Advertiser Sales, gives a news update on the latest activities in the New York office, upcoming events like ad:tech Miami and Affiliate Summit in Boston – and of course on the zanox GAP CAMPUS opening and the 1 Mio. EUR zanox Web Services Contest.

Last Wednesday we opened our brand new zanox GAP Campus with a little celebration.

We started off with the stream of the panel discussion about “Monetisation 2.0 by zanox Web Services“.

After Heiko and Jens cut the cake, customers, publishers, developers, employees and friends of zanox enjoyed cold drinks, food and music at the Campus.

Click here for all pictures from the event.

From now on the Campus is open for developers, publishers, bloggers and guests.

The Campus offers:

• New powerful zanox webservices for the monetisation 2.0


• A meeting point @zanox for publisher, advertiser and developer


• Space for events, trainings and monetisation projects


• Infrastructure, support and shared desks for the Global Alliance

Join the zanox Web Services Contest 2008!

Take your chance to receive 1 Million Euro venture capital for the best performing application based on zanox Web Services.

Come and visit us at the zanox GAP Campus! We are looking forward to seeing you!

Your zanox Campus-Team
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zanox GAP CAMPUS Location: Stralauer Allee 2, 10245 Berlin
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