Saab History

About

Photo Caption: My first Saab 900 in 1996

About the Editor:

The editor started his connection with Saab Automobile back in 1996 with the acquisition of his first Saab in Massachusetts, U.S.A., but his family’s history with SAAB, dates back to the early 1970’s. Since that time, he has made it his mission to obtain a versatile experience as a Saab owner and enthusiast through positions such as a sales representative, service technician and parts & accessories reseller.

Having lived in both New England, U.S.A. as well as Sweden, two locations one could refer to as having quite possibly the most numbers of Saab Owners and Saab Automobiles in the world. He believes he is fortunate to have taken advantage of the opportunities those experiences have afforded him to learn more about the Saab automobile and demographic in a global sense.

The editor’s most memorable and probably largest accomplishment has been the founding and running of a Saab Owners Club in Saab’s largest region of the United States, New England by forming the New England Saab Association in 1997, with the club officially launching in 2000. This position allowed him to explore the areas of leadership, event planning, marketing & advertising and public speaking and getting to know the Saab community at a very personal level.

Currently, the unpaid editor volunteers his time by running this independantly managed promotional website for the Saab brand, the Saab History website. The Saab history website focuses on promoting the Saab Automobile through the use of a variety of media from the communication of current writeups and press releases to vintage advertisements on television that best represents Saab’s past & present history.

The editor’s most recent accomplishment involves being invited as a journalist as a result of starting Saab History, involved being flown out to San Diego by Saab Cars USA, to cover the launch of the Saab Automobile USA 60th Anniversary launch program in February earlier in 2007.

The editor believes that these experiences continue to demonstrate his ability to work in varied relevant environments as well as having the necessary professional background and experiences needed for his current position as historian for the Saab history website.

The editor began Saab History in Washington, D.C. and now resides in New England.

* Please take a look at how I started my Saab Enthusiasm titled “The Saab Enthusiasm - The Beginning”

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About the Project:

The Saab History project is an independantly founded and managed grassroots awareness campaign that officially began in the fall of 2006. The objective of the ongoing project is to educate people through the viewing of the history of Saab, Saab Automobile, Aerospace and other relevant industries through written, photographic and audio/ visual content consisting of Saab’s past and present and future.

The believed benefit of this promotional site for individuals, whether they are current or prospective Saab owners, through the viewing of these films, is having a single source of information in order to gain a wide appreciation and deep understanding in a way that one could only do otherwise by scouring the internet, finding and reading through rare saab books and other such sources in print and photography.

Here is a timeline of when this project first began:

2005

On 14 June 2005, a domain name was registered as saabvideos.com

Shortly thereafter, the Saab Videos project began. The Saab video project was and still is an independantly founded and managed grassroots awareness campaign intended to A) Promote the Saab brand, B)Educate individuals through the viewing of the history of the Saab Automobile through video content consisting of Saab’s past and present.

The simple web page video listing known as www.saabvideos.com was officially launched as a mere listing of Saab videos in a chronological format, following the acquisition of that the domain.

With some light advertising and marketing for the videos project in Nines Magazine and elsewhere, the word got out and many individuals throughout the world began mailing original videocasettes, DVDs and other media for me to convert and upload to the site. The videos received, consisted of hundreds of individual videos that I have logged countless man hours in converting and making available. Initially I had these videos hosted on our site, but due the word getting out as quickly as it did, our bandwidth got eaten up so quickly that the site went down every month like clockwork because of all of the downloading. Fortunately, google videos came about, then youtube at the best possible time, and we now have been able to have these videos hosted on their servers thus removing the bandwidth limitations while also making the viewing experience much easier for everyone.

2006

The video submittals after some time, began to slow down to a point of very little content coming in that being either new or old, so I decided to brainstorm of a way to reinvigorate the submittals of video content. It seemed clear that in order to obtain more content for such a DVD, I needed to reach out to a larger audience to source the content for the project. The idea of integrating the existing videos listing into a web blog format to reach out to the global Saab community and act as an “engine” in obtaining such content appeared to be the most logical direction that the project needed to take. The new site went live in August of 2006.

With the growth in not only the video content, but writeups, photography submittals, audio samples, books, catalogs and the promotion of scale models, I realized that site needed a name that reflected more than just videos, thus the domain name saabhistory.com was acquired and reflected on the site on October 31st, 2006, thus Saabhistory.com was officially launched.

2007

Our first phase of the Saab Film project also began shortly thereafter, which has finally concluded with all of the 16mm reels that were donated, converted and now available on the website with the second phase ramping up for the fall of 2007.

At this time, the website continues to serve as a good reference for the Saab community, but I realize that it will still take more than a good presence on the internet to get the quality of videos and other media that this project’s objective deserves. There are still hundreds of videos and other content that this project seeks to either obtain, or convert to digital format and make available. With your contributions and help, I plan to continue to bring the you the high quality, rare and interesting videos and other content that you have come to expect.

The site currently has the following statistics of content as of July 24th, 2007.
* 1201 Content Rich Posts
* 320 Videos
* 52 Scale Models
* 35 Books
* 14 Catalogs

In reading, commenting on the posts, viewing the videos, and buying and reading the books, etc. one can and hopefully, become educated and/or further educated about Saab’s core fundamentals, such as, Performance, Safety,Versatility & Progressive Design and foster enthusiasm for the brand. It seems clear that today, more than ever, it is vital to reflect on the past in order to appreciate and understand the future direction of the brand. This idea of reflecting on Saab’s great past has been explicitly apparent in Saab Automobile USA current “grassroots” advertising campaign that reflects on Saab’s aircraft heritage, “Born from Jets”. The hope is that through this web blog, the public awareness of the Saab brand through the availability of the video footage amongst individuals throughout the world, will help Saab Automobile’s future success.

This project, website, and all of it’s priceless content was not possible without the contributions from the Saab Community at large in their time, energy, resources and information. If you would like to contribute and would like some good places to start, you could begin by contacting the following suggested venues:

Possible venues for Saab films & related footage:

Saab Corporate Offices (all countries)
Saab Dealerships (all countries)
Independant Saab Mechanics & Garages (all countries)
Saab Clubs - (all countries
Former Saab, SAAB-SCANIA or SAAB employees
Former Saab employees family or friends, etc, etc, etc.

Thank you for helping Saab history to continue to be one the premier sources of high quality Saab media content that consists of the past, present and future.

Please feel free to contact the site owner for any questions or concerns that you may have at info ( at ) saabhistory (dot) com

- Editor at Saab History

The site www.saabhistory.com and www.saabvideos.com, is owned and managed independently from Saab Automobile, GM and any other affiliates.

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