Thomas

The world’s best bank accounts for international travelers and nomads I’ve started blogging a bit on Medium, and I’ve set up a publication named Nomad Gate. This is one one of the first posts I wrote and it has gotten a very good reception from nomads and travelers alike. If you want to save some serious $$$ when traveling abroad (or even domestically) you should check it out! Update: Nomad Gate now lives on its own domain....

Life as a digital nomad is mostly great. But not all product and services are designed with nomads in mind. This page is mostly a place for me to vent my frustrations with companies, organizations and governments that are making life harder than it needs to be. And before anyone accuses me of wasting time on #firstworldproblems, let me just say you’re wrong. These are distinctly #nomadproblems....

If you’re building a social network, community, SaaS or anything similar to that, these are the only things that really matter: Growth Engagement Monetization And not necessarily in that order. My friend, Nir Eyal, refers to startups that have these things as GEMs (get it?). Whenever he invests in startups, he looks for products that have at least two of those, and a plan for the third. So, I created this quick Venn diagram illustrating why Growth, Engagement, and Monetization are so important:...

My Master’s Thesis is available to download: Increasing User Engagement in Online Services There are some long, messy, and frankly not very interesting appendices that are omitted from the publicly available thesis. If you really want access to those, fill out this request form. Thesis Abstract: Recent technological innovations in open source software and cloud computing have driven the cost of launching a software startup down to a fraction of what it was only few years ago....

Update 1: I no longer prefer Unblock US’ DNS service, but rather the alternative Overplay’s Smart DNS and VPN instead. Find out why. The rest of this guide is still relevant :) Update 2: Unblock US is currently offering the first month for only 99 cent if you use this landing page to order. They have also introduced yearly pricing, saving you $10 per year. Not entirely happy with your Netflix subscription?...

Normally I do not post offers like this one on my blog, but this one is too good to pass up. I recently read the brilliant book Protect your tech by Mish & Rob of the Anywherist group. One of the things I realized while reading it was how risky it is to use public WiFi connections without a good VPN service. It’s the case both when traveling and surfing at the local Starbucks or at your university or company....

Not all features are good features. And it looks like that’s the case for a seemingly cool feature Mailchimp introduced a while back, namely Manage Replies. One annoyance you will face as an email marketer is a flood of Out-of-Office replies whenever you send a campaign to more than a few thousand people. That’s exactly what Mailchimp’s Manage Replies feature aims to solve. What it does is to route any replies to your campaign to their servers instead of your inbox....

Over the last couple of days great things have happened for users of Google Voice. First, a couple days ago Google slashed their prices on a lot of international destinations. The countries I used to call the most, Denmark and Norway got slashed from 15 cents per minute to 3 and 4 cents per minute, respectively. That’s for cell phones. Landlines was already 2 cents, but I mean, who uses landlines anymore?...

iPhone 6 (4.7”): Hardware: Too little, too late. Software: Meh. Available September 19 (in the US and a few other countries). iPhone 6 Plus (5.5”): Hardware: Too little, too late. Software: Meh. Available September 19 (in the US and a few other countries). iOS 8: Still a massive meh. Apple Pay: A small meh. Only available on the new iPhone models. No real benefit over Google Wallet and the likes. Will probably help grow the contactless payment ecosystem, so a good thing for all of us....