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A few years back I headed up the redesign of the Kelkoo you can see today. Inspired by the story of the Nike logo I got Pierre’s support for announcing a logo competition. it was a terrific success I thought - we got more than 1500 proposals from more than 20 countries, we got a winner forming the basis of the new design and I got a new friend - Hans-Jürgen Sodeikat. Here’s his winning logo:

We kept in touch over the years so when going to Berlin last week it was great to catch up with his current doings. Much to my surprise HaJü chose to go to film school after his senior design education - and he’s now showing his immense talents in yet another area: 3d animation character design.

Check out HaJü’s blog where he’s showing off stuff he’s making daily. Pretty cool stuff! I was lucky to spend an hour with him at the new Haubtbahnhof in Berlin and he showed my all his cool work such as: “The Sacred Stone of Horus“!

My prediction: HaJü will be famous one day - and YouTube could make it happen sooner than we think

Bill Burnham has nicely coined a new term: Persistent Search. Imagine doing a normal search on Google and everytime there is a new (and really relevant) result you would get a mail, new ping in your feed reader or messsenger. Actually the term may be new, but the idea is not - I have been using GoogleAlert for years and it was really cool as long as it was free (wonder if Gideon has found a way to make it free now - AdWords or AdSense should be able to do it for him?). Googlealert does more or less exactly what Bill is looking for - it tells you (via mail) what new results have popped up for your queries - like Google News only looking at the index as a whole, not only news sites.

A company I think may be positioned for a good run for the future race on “persistent search” is Attentio, which today is a B2B company focussing on temporal search and tools for figuring out the online buzz related big brands. With not much tweaking the founders Simon and Per could help the avereage search user do a persistent search across a number of targetted search collections (like news, blogs, web, etc.)