This was fun … and who knows. Maybe it even works!

After month of hard work we are proud to announce that the first issue of our new daily and FREE newspaper ‘Nyhedsavisen’ is now on the street. With an initial circulation of 500.000 copies – going to about 1.000.000 as we get more printing press online we are the biggest newspaper in Denmark.  A newspaper that gets delivered to your door at 7 am every morning – free!  Check out the printversion here: http://e-avis.avisen.dk/index.php But there’s more. In our world free does not mean crappy quality. Nyhedsavisen and our online site www.avisen.dk provide readers with the following: 

• A quality newspaper competing head on with the three other serious newspapers in Denmark – Politiken, Berlingske and JP.
• Top-notch newsroom – 100 of the best journalists in Denmark ready to dig and get real stories. (Yesterday we broke the story on local populist party ‘Dansk Folkeparty’ making rude fun of ethnic minorities in Denmark. This is being picked up worldwide as a follow on to the Muhammed drawings).
• A website that integrates news with social networking and blogging. Anyone can comment and contribute. Journalists are on a par with readers. What hits the front-page is decided by common interest and popularity.
• The worlds first ‘intelligent’ news-site. It tracks what you read and learns your interest. Then builds a unique ‘online newspaper’ for you reflecting your interests and habits.
  

So how can we offer all of this at no charge?  Simple. Advertising pays. We believe we can build a better, meaner, leaner newspaper, do away with subscriptions and instead rely on massive distribution power to get advertisers aboard. Our launch yesterday proves the model. 60% editorial stuff. 40% advertising. And our books are full at the moment. Who is behind this initiative? It takes a lot of people and a lot of money to get something like this of the ground. Fortunately this concept is developed by a killer team: Dagsbrun & Baugur.These two formidable Icelandic companies supplied planning, structure, financing and everything else needed to get of the ground.  Gunnar Smari: CEO of Dagsbrun and new CEO of the new venture group behind Nyhedsavisen worked ceaselessly to pull everything together.Svenn Dam. Left his job as head-honcho at MetroExpress (Europe’s largest free newspaper) to come to Nyhedsavisen and lead the battle.Morten Nissen. Another MetroExpress stalwart now managing the Danish version and making sure the advertising department sells, sells, and sells (and boy, can that guy sell!).David Trads. Our editor in chief. Former editor of Information one of our most respected political dailies and a well-known Icon in the Danish media world.Kristoffer Gravgaard. Online news editor – from Reuters Digital and with the skills to bring hard news, blogging, social networking and user empowerment together.HelloGroup and HelloDigital. Online engineers and wizards – Stephan, Anders, Jørgen, Jakob, Peter S., and a truckload of programmers that worked tirelessly to get the online section up on time (and is, as a matter of fact still fixing bugs as this is being written).LundKenner. Proud micro-minority stakeholders, online-hippies and doing our best to perform as well as everyone else (challenging task).  Check us out  For those of you that read Danish go to the site www.avisen.dk and http://e-avis.avisen.dk/index.php and check us out. For the rest of you … we will be coming to your country as soon as we can. Cheers Soren  PS. Big thank you to everyone involved. Our Icelandic friends for financing and structuring, Gunnar, Svenn, Morten N. and Kristoffer for pulling everything together. Hello Digital for constructing the site. And the many hundred other people working diligently on moving the project forward. PPS. Some stiff competition out there … but you know what: We’re gonna whoop their butt!

We are certainly getting a lot of attention from savvy netizens these days. Zecco.com Alexa ranking before we leaked the story that we will be offering zero-commission trading = 412.000. Zecco.com Alexa ranking 36 hours later: 3.160! And climbing. Also comparisons with E*Trade, Amex, Schwab etc is fun at the moment …

Obviously rankings alone will not get the job done. We open our doors for business on October 9th and what we need is customers. Plus all the friends we can get. Launching a frontal attack on a 160 billion industry is fun and scary at the same time. But the good news is that the big boys will not be able to follow us into zero-commission territory. Take E*Trade as an example … they had revenues of around 1,5 billion last year … of which $500 came from commissions. But they had expences of around$1,2 billion so doing away with commissions would leave them some $300 in the hole.

A lot of people have asked how Zecco.com can offer zero-commission trading and still hope to survive … but the answer is relatively simple. A trade costs around $2 and we are willing and able to absorb that as doing businesss with you the customer because we do not spend the approx $6 per trade in sales and marketing costs that the big guys like Schwab, E*Trade etc. do.

Instead we believe a great deal and word of mouth is all we need to get the publics attention … after all, why pay as much as $15 a trade for something that should and can be made free?

Another question I have gotten from many people is whether their money will be safe with Zecco.com and whether the trade-execution will be as fast as our competitors. The answer to both of those questions is yes.

Zecco.com used Penson as our settlement and clearance house — one of the largest such institutions in the US. Customers money are kept at Penson and trades are executed on their infrastructure (incidentally the same infrastructure used by many of our larger competitors). Equity and cash in accounts at pension are heavily regulated and insured … so your money is just as safe with Zecco.com as with any other US online brokerage. You can check out pensons website here. www.penson.com — one reason we chose these guys over several other possibilities was their phenomenal trackrecord!

Here is the original press release that set the Zecco.com ball rolling. 

The Price War is Over.  The Investor Won.  Trading Now Costs $0. LOS ANGELES — Zecco.com today announced that it will launch the industry’s first zero commission online trading site on October 9^th.Since the arrival of online brokerages in the early 1990’s, aggressive competition has helped reduce commissions from an initial high of $40 to a present average of around $9. While competition remains fierce, massive operating and customer acquisition costs make it difficult for the industry’s larger players to reduce commissions further.“The big guys need the commission to keep their marketing machine going” explains Zecco.com founder and CEO Jeroen Veth, a 37 year old entrepreneur and former Merrill Lynch Vice President. “The actual cost of a trade is only around $2 but if you spend $500 or more per customer in marketing costs and run your business on old legacy systems, as many of the big guys do, you need the revenue commissions generate,” explains Mr. Veth.“Our model is different. We run a lean operation, use the latest technology and rely entirely on word of mouth, guerrilla marketing, viral campaigns and public relations to get the message out. As a result, we can look at the $2 per trade as the cost of doing business while maximizing our revenues from interest accrued from margin loans, broker accounts and additional premium financial services such as options,” notes Mr. Veth. The trading experience offered by Zecco.com is further enhanced by a website that blends other free services including financial blogging, discussion forums, and up-to-the-minute financial news into a seamless web 2.0 experience. In another unique twist, Zecco.com shares advertising revenue with users who blog on the site as a way to continually improve the site’s content.“Think of Zecco.com as the intersection where online brokerage meets Yahoo Finance and MySpace,” explains Mr. Veth. We believe investors want to share ideas and opinions – and we want to make it possible for anyone – customer or not – to do that on our website. We offer not just free trading but also free blogging, free forums and the chance to connect and share with other investors and netizens. In fact we even offer to share advertising revenue with users who blog on our site.” The mix of a disruptive business model and a web-savvy social networking approach may be unique to the financial industry – but not to the team of investors and founders behind Zecco.com – among which can be found early Skype investor Morten Lund, famed entrepreneur Marcel Boekhoorn and Soren Kenner, former chairman of McCann Erickson MRM Europe.  

Got approached by two German guys with the idea of putting up a website that makes it easy for tourists and travellers to ‘meet a local’ with the same interests and spend some time. Fun idea although hard to see how you can monetize it. Take a look at it here: www.meet-a-local.com

Spending a good deal of time at Saxo Bank helping them sort out their marketing and media strategy plus getting their marketing department organized. Fun to be ‘inside’ the corporate environment for a change. Nice people, although hard to understand why everyone feel compelled to wear suit and tie at all times. Even the web-guys!

Zecco, our online brookerage play is getting ready to launch in LA with a never-seen-before trading approach. And the great news is that we look to be xtremely well-funded now thanks to Marcel B. — the famous Dutch entreprenour stepped in with several million to top of our coffers. Big time, here we come!

Feeling a bit mellow today — sort of a bit under the weather. Maybe a bit stressed out. It’s Sunday. It’s weekend. It’s kick back and feel lazy time.