I just updated the MJ Launcher posting, see previous post http://tlidforss.blogspot.com/2009/10/mjetzappgif.html or go and check out, http://mjetz.com from your mobile phone browser.
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Wednesday, November 04, 2009
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
The MJ Launcher - Transforming your mobile experience (updated)
Here's a quick review of Mjetz or the MJ Launcher application.
The MJ Launcher is using patented active widget technology to smoothly blend browsing, RSS feeds and IM/email services in your mobile phone. MJ Launcher is presently only available as a J2ME app on your phone (works on 1B+ phones in the world though). But I think you have to imagine what can be done on new touch screen iPhone, Android, Windows Phone and Symbian devices.
The major advantage of using the MJ Launcher is that you can get your own "UI" the way you want to have it based on your internet needs regardless of what the phone was delivered with.
The best way to test mjetz (today) is to use a J2ME enabled phone and download from the phone browser using http://mjetz.com
The site recognizes IP addresses and should propose a local version automatically. If not you can select by using e.g. http://mjetz.com/cn
Please also note that mjetz today is not what mjetz will and can become tomorrow. New local versions are being developed all the time regarding language and content.
If you register as a user and logon to mjetz from your computer, you can customize your phone from the computer in addition to the phone.
There is also an admin tool that can be provided for operators and content aggregators/distributors so you can customize content and configurations for your customers.
New versions in particular for touch screen phones are under development by mJetz such as an active widget Google Android version including plans for iPhone and Windows Phones. There are for this company and products investment opportunities for companies who are interested in this.
Please feel free to test and try services.
Contact Thomas Lidforss International for select representation and management of business partner and outsourcing services!
Sunday, September 27, 2009
How to make real money out of virtual money in your virtual world
I attended a very interesting event with a presentation around the topic "Virtual Worlds and Entrepreneurship" at the IVA center in Stockholm, Sep. 22.
Guest speaker was Robin Teigland, Associate professor at Stockholm School of Economics (SSES), http://www.hhs.se
Here are som quick facts (but I encourage you to view the embedded presentation).
- 579 M users
- 68 MUSD invested in 1Q 2009
- Tweens biggest user group
- 39% increase in userbase from Q1
- Games and strategy players have started incorporating on their resumes/CVs facts about what they manage and are capable of doing in the virtual world
- 2 BUSD in micro transactions
- One example, Mindark's Entropia Universe has got 780k users, 420 MUSD in revenue AND a real and virtual bank
- Another examle of how you can make money, one guy sold the virtual Asteroid Space Resort for 100k USD in 2005
Some Chinese sites on the subject;
Robin and SSES are using Linden labs' Second Life services, http://www.secondlife.com for education, research and cooperation with other universities. See as one example the SSE Island area on SecondLife.
The use of 3d virtual worlds will expand to develop demos, showcases and training programs. IBM is e.g. using it to design "green" data centers.
Some company examples; IBM island and Accenture island, for more information about research contact robin.teigland at hhs.se
http://www.knowledgenetworking.org
http://www.slideshare.net/eteigland
http://www.secondlife.com
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Sweden - US Entrepreneurial Forum 2009 Update - Get the presentations while available
Here's a quick update, if you would like see the presentations from the Sweden-US Entrepreneurial Forum 2009 event, check out the following link while they are still available.
http://www.esbri.se/sweden-us/2009_presentations.asp
Contact Thomas Lidforss International for select reprensentation and management of business partner and outsourcing services!
http://www.esbri.se/sweden-us/2009_presentations.asp
Contact Thomas Lidforss International for select reprensentation and management of business partner and outsourcing services!
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Epicor 9 - Product launch event at Nalen, Stockholm
I attended the product launch event of Epicor's latest, Epicor 9. For those of you who do not know Epicor; Epicor is a world-wide developer and distributor of ERP systems. Epicor has more than 2800 customers in 143 countries. Epicor is a Microsoft Gold Partner. See http://www.epicor.com for company details.
Stefan Westelius, swestelius at epicor.com, partner evangelist at Epicor Sweden introduced the launch event.
The theme for the event was Protect, Extend and Converge. The goal; protect existing iScala customer base and installations while allowing a kind of "best of breed" set of service extensions to be made available and the option of converging into one system with the new Epicor 9 release.
Protect
iScala - The ERP
Some interesting notes around new release, support for the following areas:
SEPA (Single Euro Payments Area) is an EU payment standards initiative. The EPC (European Payments Council) develops the framework needed to implement the Single Euro Payments Area. See
www.europeanpaymentscouncil.eu for details.
Svefaktura is a Swedish standard for electronic invoicing. See information from SFTI steering group for details, http://www.svefaktura.se
SAF-T (Standard Audit File for Tax Purposes) support. See http://www.oecd.org/.../0,2340,en_2649_33749_34910329_1_1_1_1,00.html for guidance information.
Epicor has an interesting way of supporting old products as long as customers buy maintenance services without forcing customers to upgrade to new releases.
Extend
The "extend concept" allows for ala carte type set of selecting your most wanted applications for your business. One good example demoed was Storefront, the e-commerce site service. I really like the way Epicor does a demo, you integrate your powerpoints with hotlinks to iScala and log in to the live service. This provides an excellent view of what you are presenting and what the application does for your business.
Storefront your one stop shop for e-commerce sites that can be used as a complement to your existing website or also as a tool for creating your business site.
Converge
With the new Epicor 9, in addition to the integration of different products into one system, comes new front ends. You do not have to be used any longer to find information the "traditional way" with a client application looking through tables and forms. Now, you can just search, like the "Google generation", just search and you will find the answer. The new release comes with search integration and information presented with hotlinks and relevance count, so you can find an answer to any question you may have. I like the format, very blog label inspired.
Since I had to leave for a conference call, I missed the afternoon part with the tech details but I have to say thank you to the Epicor people for an excellent setup and arrangements. I understand why SAP is watching what Epicor does...
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Thursday, September 17, 2009
Notes from Sweden - US Entrepreneurial Forum 2009, Sep 16 in Stockholm
I attended the first day of this event in Stockholm. Here are some key notes and comments from some of the presenters;
Magnus Aronsson, Managing Director for ESBRI, the institute for entrepreneurs and small business research, http://www.esbri.se and Randy Mitchell, Private Equite Specialist, U.S. Department of Commerce were the co-chairs of this event. Randy talked among other things about the usefulness of the SBIC, Small Business Investment Company. For more info see http://www.smallbusinessnotes.com/financing/sbic.html
Jöran Hägglund the State Secretary, Ministry of Enterprise, Energy and COmmunications was also part of the introduction. A panel about the role of government followed. Us view basically "Get the Government out of the way"... where as the Swedish version is more of Government guidance and control...
My two cents out of this is basically, I think Sweden needs to explore the "Chinese" way of developing businesses, "create economical free zones" where you as an entrepreneur can get a number of years of no tax and other benefits to get a chance succeeding building a new business that can become a big enterprise. All the political parties and people are just too focused on getting (re)-elected to their offices and cannot do what it takes. One simple example is, why should I have to pay 100k SEK (about 15k+ USD) to register a corporation in Sweden when it will cost you about 30 USD in Las Vegas and less than 250 pounds in UK... and why should you have to pay about 55% tax on personal company income (salary)??
The next session focused on how to get funded these days in the aftermath of a world-wide financial crisis.
Kimberlie Cerrone, entreprenuer and involved with The Angels Forum in Palo Alto, CA. See http://www.angelsforum.com and kimberlie at gmail.com or +14153782838.
Some points;
- 1M USD in revenue is what investors are looking for
- "Put me as no 1 on your B round of funding"
- Intrapreneurship
- Great crop of companies will evolve in the years 2012-2014 in the valley once liquidity available
As a reference for Kimberlie, see also
http://www.esbri.se/pdf/Panel_4_Kimberlie_Cerrone.pdfClare Fairfield, Managing Director Concerto Ventures was next, for more info about Clare see http://www.esbri.se/artikel_visa.asp?id=506
Some points;
- Government programs can be more useful for entrepreneurs these days
- Use service providers
- VC companies with over 50M USD will get new SEC regulatory rules
- Consider cross border alliances
- Break down funding needs into smaller pieces
- Conserve, conserve, conserve your cash needs
- Use milestones whenever possible
- Funding rate 1-2%
- Success rate 10-20%
- Fail rate 20-40%
A conclusion I make of his presentation was basically as before, do not use VC money unless you have no other way of getting funded.
Katarina Bonde, Managing Director of Kubicorp was up next in the funding section. See for e.g. http://www.linkedin.com/pub/katarina-bonde/0/23/78b for her public LinkedIn profile.
Here are her options for getting funded;- Through revenues
- Regional funds
- If you have got positive sales go to bank
- If you are in the export business go to EKN (Exportkreditnämden), http://www.ekn.se
- Use covertible debt
- Finance through invoices
- Joint projects with customers
- Partner with distributors
- Create a pre pay business model
- Barter of trade your products or services
- In Sweden check out the SVCA list of VCs, http://www.svca.se
- Look in different regions of the country and start there
- Partner with customers in a coop, example given, in state of Washington, a wine development company started by inviting interested customers to buy shares of the company to get started
ALMI has been around for quite some time but this spring they have launched the new investment part of the company. See http://www.almi.se
- Regional offices owned by Swedish counties to 49%
- They do equity investments
- 1-10 MSEK put up by them
- Mission is to bridge gap to get started
- They have 7 regional funds, 1B SEK, launched in spring 09, 50% EU funding
- Max 50% co-funding is the rule
- They are looking for 5-15 MSEK investments, companies with good potential and within 7 yrs an exit
Monday, September 07, 2009
Update on Windows Mobile Marketplace launch event in Stockholm
Windows Marketplace for Mobile Developer Registration Walk Through
Here's an update on an event I attended early summer. For those of you that missed the presentations, Per Ahlberg Developer Evangelist Microsoft has made the presentations available om his MDSN blog, http://tinyurl.com/kr9m8hView more presentations from Mike Francis.
Johan Huss Mobile Solutions Specialist Microsoft presented Windows Mobile 6.5 that will be available on Oct. 7 in Sweden. Among the features, a "thumb" friendly touch friendly UI with good support for widgets. I tested the new UI features on an HTC Touch and Samsung Omnia and works very well for touch operation.
In addition to "touch" being a big thing with launch of Windows Mobile 6.5, MyPhone is a new convenient service where you as a user can sync and manage your phones data on the web. Works very well for managing contact data and syncing with your phone. This service works for older phones also, you do not have to wait for 6.5 to start using it. See for further details,
http://myphone.microsoft.com
Philippe Goldstein, Microsoft France presented the launch of Windows Mobile Marketplace.
Some comments;
- No Java or scripts allowed in marketplace
- Native code, managed code and widgets allowed
- 3-4 weeks for application certification
- Cost 99 USD for 1st year for 5 apps thereafte per app
- Revenue sharing, developer gets 70%, Microsoft (and partners) 30%
http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/windowsphone/default.aspx
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Wednesday, September 02, 2009
Sino-Sweden Mobile Internet Business Seminar about upcoming GMIC conference in Hangzhou
Some quick news about a Chinese delegation visiting Sweden and the Kista Science City in Stockholm. I attended eariler today the Sino-Sweden Mobile Internet Business Seminar at the Stockholm Kista Science Tower, sponsored by ISA, Invest in Sweden agency and GWC, Mobile Internet The Great Wall Club.
The Global Mobile Internet Conference 2010 is coming up in March 2010 in Hangzhou, China. The theme of the conference is Mobile Internet Opportunities in Asia. GMIC wants to promote international cooperation around mobile internet services and issues. GMIC sess Asia as the area of the world where mobile internet is going to be the key area whereas Europe with GSMA is more the mobile operator center and USA and North America is more internet and internet software.
The GMIC is an organization;
Guided by
- Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, China
- Minstry of Culture- Ministry of Commerce
- State Council Information Office
- China Association of Communication Enterprises
- China Internet Association
Organizers
- Mobile Internet the Great Wall Club,
Co-organizers
- MCF (Japan)
- YRP (Japan)
- IVP (japan)
- Sino-Japan Communication Industry Promotion Association
- KINTERNET (South Korea)
- KWISA (South Korea)
- CDMA
- CDG
On a personal note, this event was well organized thanks to Tomas Bennich from Kista Showcase and people from Invest in Sweden Agency but I have to complain about whoever manages the facilities in the Kista Science Tower, no ventilation and warm humid air does not work very well for any event, blame global warming or whatever but facilities management has to work in a business building...
Tuesday, September 01, 2009
What to do about Plaxo - Nuke it or?
Plaxo is I think a sad story, it started as an ambitious service for all office outlook users as a way to synch your business contacts back in 2002 if I remember correctly. Then once the social networking services hype got up to speed, Plaxo became a social networking site with a lot of promise. But with limitations, lack of access to info, screwed up (I think) user interface, and very little has happened even after Comcast acquired Plaxo, I see no future in using Plaxo, I think it is a service that is also rude to users;
Why should I as a user receive hundreds of invitations to get connected by people and I cannot view them (get the warning too many requests, you are too close to the limit 1000, please remove some so you can accept...) but on top of that Plaxo suggests I should connect since there are 5100+ people that I according to Plaxo know. There is no logic to it... to me it seems like if I have too many connections, It should not even be possible for other users to send me a request to connect, they should simply get a message that I have reached Plaxo's limit and that is it!
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Embedded browser in Net TV by Philips
In case you have not noticed, TV sets are changing. I attended a while ago an event in Kista, Stockholm sponsored by Philips and their new Net TV division. The presenters were;
- Åke Johansson, ake.johansson at philips.com head of Philips consumer area and Net TV champion.
- Tomas Hedqvist, tomas.hedqvist at m-one.se, consult in digital media and service acqusition partner for Philips in the Nordic region, http://www.m-one.se/
- Fredrik Andersson, co-founder Net Tv service from Accedo Broadband, http://www.accedobroadband.com/
- Anna Caracolis, CEO of Adimo, mobile consulting services, http://www.adimo.com/, Anna presented practical opinions and results from porting designs from a 3" mobile phone screen to a 42" TV was not difficult.
Some facts about Net TV;
- Standard used is CE html
- Windows media and H264 supported but no Adobe flash yet
- Optimized for 720 by 1080 format
- Remote control controlled and operated
- Fonts and readability important when designing web services for Net TV
- Forecast says about 180M TV sets will be CE html enabled by 2012
The demo TVs used regular 16:9 HD TV sets but Philips also used the opportunity to showcase the new 21:9 see also http://www.consumer.philips.com/c/cinema-21-9/30849/cat/gb/
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Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Get your facts about who are your different social media users
Social Media Strategy presentation from Globalization Strategies LLC visualized by the wizards at http://vizedu.com Interesting classification and stats on how you divide your users into different categories. Enjoy the presentation above.
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Friday, June 26, 2009
Jix up your short url links with Adjix
I have just tested a new shorten or shrink url addresses to use when you twitter, blog or email. Adjix works with the option to have ads from different categories inserted on top of your page. You also get link tracking plus an option to earn money. Works very well and if you choose to have ads to are not very intrusive. The link statistics feature is a nice to have function.
Saturday, May 02, 2009
Need attention - Get your Google profile business card
Google has recently launched a new service, get your own free Google business cards based on your Google profile. This offer is so far only available if you have a continental US postal address (and upto 25000 cards) but I think this is a great idea and incentive for anybody who does not have a profile to create one right away. Be aware of also that until you have created one with a vanity url, the address you would like to have will most likely be taken if you wait, remember the early days of dot com address registrations.
Friday, April 10, 2009
The 100 Mb/s race is on - mobile broadband internet in any form or way
Now you can get 2x or 3x mobile brodband internet speed to your laptop through the upgrade of HSPA to HSPA+ or as people call it here in Sweden, Turbo 3g+ service. Telia and Tele2 have announced and started selling 14.4 Mb/s or some locations 22 Mb/s, Tele2 14.4 Mb/s only, where as 3 is betting on 22 Mb/s service. 3 has announced the service to be launched during April but not yet updated their website. Telenor has not announced anything yet but will (I think follow soon).
Prices vary from 25-50 USD per month depending on carrier and subscription plan as low as 18 USD per month if you bundle your services. There are many pricing combinations though, I think most consumers are going to find it very difficult to compare the services. The mobile operators are doing a "swiss army-knife" style kind of marketing to cut out the biggest slice of the market for their company. All the operators (except 3) are also still penalizing pre-paid customers by having unrealistic data traffic limitations.
See urls for pricing data:
http://www.tele2.se/mobilt-bredband.html
This is now being marketed while the race is on to introduce LTE service within a year. The city of Stockholm is aiming at being first in the world with commercial LTE service, something the city of Oslo is also trying to achieve....
A final comment about these service from a hardware point of view, nobody says one word about software upgradability of modems, so if you are a pre-paid customer, you may end up in having to buy three modems within a year and you are out of luck if you have bought a laptop with built-in modem
Saturday, April 04, 2009
ArcticStartup event in Stockholm - Blast from startups in the arctic
The Finnish ArcticIndex organized the first joint Swedish-Finnish startup event called ArcticStartup in Stockholm last week. The Social Media Business Network, http://www.sombiz.net/ and SwedishStartups were among the organizers in addition to Bonniers Media with as always the colorful Morris Packer as one of the key speakers.
In case you have missed the ArcticIndex site, I can really recommend it to stay in touch with interesting new Nordic and Baltic startups. See picture of people info section below:
LG GD900 multi-touch smart phone with transparent keypad, mousepad or what?
Just announced at the wireless CTIA show in Las Vegas, the LG GD900 multi touch phone. I think this is an interesting but a little bit "gimmicky" concept. Has a slider design transparent numerical keypad that doubles as a touchpad with iPhone style mouse functions in addition to the touch screen. This is though a full featured smart phone with touch screen, 8MP camera, video and the usual stuff. Watch the video and you will see the nice UI LG has developed for his phone. It is clear that multi touch and OLED screens will become the new design guide for all smart phones in addition to high resolution camera and video functions.
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Friday, April 03, 2009
Open is the New Cool - Open breakfast with Sun and SIME in Stockholm
I attended the Sun Open Breakfast event that took place at the IVA conference center in Stockholm on April 2. Map of location. This was the first in a series of 'open' breakfast events hosted by Sun Microsystems and SIME. The event was introduced by Ola Ahlvarsson from SIME introducing Stefan Alariksson, the CEO of Sun in Sweden.
Open is the new cool
Stefan explained how and why Sun has moved from being mainly associated with server hardware to an open software and solutions company. Sun has with their packaged solutions of open source software been growing and gaining more customers. Sun in Sweden has about 2B SEK in revenue out of about 200 employees. Stefan also talked about the fact that despite what a lot people think, how can you make any money with open source?, you can, by getting faster and bigger penetration on the market, you classify customers into different segments. The individual user who downloads a copy of MySQL will not want to pay for the software or services but a successful corporate customer needs and wants to pay for qualified professional services. So even if only 10% of the customers pay, Sun is making money.
Open Minds panel discussion
Henrik Torstensson, head of strategy at Stardoll - http://www.stardoll.com a site targetting tween girls and general manaer Piczo, http://www.piczo.com a social networking site where you can easily design your own site, blog, avatars and use games, music, quizzes...
Ulf Ekberg, music entrepreneur from the group Ace of Base and into new business models for the musicians.
Fredrik Runnquist, former IT boss at Swedbank and board member in several corporations.
Stefan Alariksson, CEO Sun Microsystems
Good information was presented, nothing new if you are in this business, but talk about efficient business models, penetration of market share, having real customers, working relations, scalability, value of partnering...
An open table discussion followed. My personal take on this was that there is not enough time to actively start such a discussion, I think for the next event, it would be better if the organizers
focus on a theme and have branch specific people giving their feedback with a possibility to let people participating in the event have a chance to do select networking.
focus on a theme and have branch specific people giving their feedback with a possibility to let people participating in the event have a chance to do select networking.
Anders Carlsarv, head of sales, Sun Microsystems, concluded by announcing next Open Breakfast event, May 7 which will focus on Cloud Computing. Monitor http://www.sun.se/breakfast for coming events. Sun has recently published a white paper on Cloud Computing, for more info about this area, see http://www.sun.com/solutions/cloudcomputing/index.jsp
Thanks to the sponsors also for an excellent breakfast.
Sunday, March 22, 2009
Make it Mobile with MMA guidelines - Mobile Marketing Association
Here's a little tidbit of information about where to find useful guidelines if you are getting into mobile services and do not know enough. MMA, the Mobile Markering Association has a number of useful guideline documents available for download as pdfs even if you are not a member of the MMA. See a select list below;
MMA Code of Conduct
http://www.mmaglobal.com/codeofconduct.pdf
MMA Consumer Best Practices Guidelines
http://www.mmaglobal.com/bestpractices.pdf
Mobile Advertising Overview
http://www.mmaglobal.com/mobileadoverview.pdf
Understanding Mobile Marketing:Technology & Reach
http://www.mmaglobal.com/MMAMobileMarketing102.pdf
Off Portal - An Introduction to the Market Opportunity
http://www.mmaglobal.com/offportal.pdf
Mobile Marketing Sweepstakes & Promotions Guide
http://www.mmaglobal.com/mobilepromotions.pdf
Mobile Search Use Cases
http://www.mmaglobal.com/mobilesearchintro.pdf
Introduction to Mobile Coupons
http://www.mmaglobal.com/mobilecoupons.pdf
Short Code Primer
http://www.mmaglobal.com/shortcodeprimer.pdf
W3C Mobile Web Best Practices
http://www.w3.org/TR/Mobile-bp/
W3C mobileOK Basic 1.0 Guidelines
http://www.w3c.org/TR/mobileOK-basic10-tests/
W3C mobileOK Checker
http://www.w3c.org/mobile
http://www.mmaglobal.com/codeofconduct.pdf
MMA Consumer Best Practices Guidelines
http://www.mmaglobal.com/bestpractices.pdf
Mobile Advertising Overview
http://www.mmaglobal.com/mobileadoverview.pdf
Understanding Mobile Marketing:Technology & Reach
http://www.mmaglobal.com/MMAMobileMarketing102.pdf
Off Portal - An Introduction to the Market Opportunity
http://www.mmaglobal.com/offportal.pdf
Mobile Marketing Sweepstakes & Promotions Guide
http://www.mmaglobal.com/mobilepromotions.pdf
Mobile Search Use Cases
http://www.mmaglobal.com/mobilesearchintro.pdf
Introduction to Mobile Coupons
http://www.mmaglobal.com/mobilecoupons.pdf
Short Code Primer
http://www.mmaglobal.com/shortcodeprimer.pdf
W3C Mobile Web Best Practices
http://www.w3.org/TR/Mobile-bp/
W3C mobileOK Basic 1.0 Guidelines
http://www.w3c.org/TR/mobileOK-basic10-tests/
W3C mobileOK Checker
http://www.w3c.org/mobile
Sunday, March 15, 2009
Excitera Enterprise Forum Event in Stockholm on Mar 12
The organization Excitera Enterprise Forum held an event last week for entrepreneurs and students who would like to become new ones. This event took place at Naringslivets Hus in Stockholm.
Nicklas Mattsson, chief editor for the magazine, Entreprenör was the moderator for the event.
Elby Kwok Drewsen was the first speaker. She is the founder and owner of Lotus Travel. Lotus does specialize in organizing travel from Sweden to China. She described her long road to success, having to learn many different roles on her way to her focused niche business. Lotus Travel also has a sister company, Scandinavian Perspectives focusing on the opposite, travel from China to Sweden.
Ola Ahlvarsson, the founder of Result was up next, since this was the second time I listened to the same presentation, I put more attention to his laptop computer. Ola earlier in the day, this presenation at the Sun Nordic Software Roadshow event. This time though, he got computer problems, seeing that his machine was still running Windows 2000, I think he need to get a new laptop... anyway, always entertaining.
Pontus Lindwall finished the evening presenting his experiences from the gambling and entertainment services company, Betsson. Pontus realized early, already back in 1996 that internet gambling was going to be big. He founded Net Entertainment that later got acquired by his previous employer, Cherry where Pontus became CEO. Cherry later acquired Betsson.com, changed name to Betsson which is nowadays has a 350M EUR value. Gambling for sure is profitable even in these financial crisis days. I heard a similar story from Norbert Teufelberger and bwin.
Many thanks to the arranger, Excitera Enterprise Forum and their sponsors for a good event with food, beverage, networking and mingling.
Excitera Mobile Cup 2009 with Interesting Speakers & Award Ceremony #1
The first Excitera Mobile Cup 2009 event with award ceremony took place at Telenor HQ in Stockholm on Mar. 11. Hannes Dernehl and The Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship arranged the event. Five startups were also awarded for best new business concepts. Unfortunately, mutual NDA i signed by the companies and the organizer so I could not get that much out of the award ceremony.
Mikael Lindström from Mobilstart did a live demo and presentation of how to create a mobile application using Mobilstart's services. A simple shortcode SMS application and a shortcode application using POS command for positioning prompting. If you can live with the features supported, you can quickly develop a mobile application and get it working on all 4 Swedish mobile networks, Telenor, Telia, 3 and Tele2.
Joel Brosjö, Dubtools presented experiences from their MyQuran project. Dubtools is focusing on mobile publishing tools and he explained how they by pure coincidence came up with the idea of publishing citations from the holy book of quran and services for muslims and Jonas Vig, Bambuser presented his highly popular mobile video broadcasting service.
Sun Nordic Software Roadshow Spring 2009 - Stockholm event
I attended the Sun Nordic Sofware roadshow event on Mar. 12 in Stockholm. Ola Ahlvarsson of SIME and founder of Result warmed everybody up and presented entrepreneurial projects and business models. An interesting point made was, no lack of ideas or concepts in businesses today, the trick is how to execute properly and do something with the ideas. Ola also pointed out the importance of building a business with a business model focusing on relations with people NOT just trying to push a new product or service on to a customer.
Thorbjörn Fritzon, Sun Microsystems, presented Sun's roadmap in Open Source and how did we get there. He pointed out that maybe a lot of people still see Sun as a hardware server company. Things have changed a lot within Sun and the last 3-5 years, they have become a software company, with Open Solaris, MySQL, Glassfish (ASP server software), Open ESB (Enterprise services bus), Open SSO (Single Sign-on and ID management) and working on increasing the ecosystem of partners, integrator and professional services companies.
Kaj Arnö who is VP Community Relations at MySQL continued with MySQL and the importance of community relations.
Daniel Fröding from Coss Technologies presented GlassFish, Sun's application server platform that is gaining a lof of traction on the market. Coss Tech provides ASP solutions and professional services basd on GlassFish.
Tickstar is a company focusing on systems integrtion using Open ESB which provides a vendor independent solution of integration of different server solutions in your network. Martin Nyqvist presented how Tickstar is using Open ESB. See Tickstar presentation here.
Thorbjörn Fritzon, Sun Microsystems, presented OpenSSO which is Sun's solution for AAA services and federated identity management. Måns Håkansson then concluded with Sun's solution for Identity access management and the value of role managemnt for rule and policy compliance among users.
Lars Tunkrans, Fujitsu Services then finished the presentations of the day describing how Sun's VDI (Virtual Desktop) is working and projects undertaken by Fujitsu using VDI services. Lars showed differences between different "thin client" solutions going all the way from a thin client application just installed on a regular PC to a diskless client station, no software installed, no power adaptor used (powered through power over ethernet). He brought a proposal project they won (about 250 client stations and server infrastructure) and got to deliver to Värmdö county (just east of Stockholm) which included cost of energy saved as well as very low maintenance and support cost. Since there is no moving parts, no software installed, very small power consumption, about 4W per client station, there is very little that can go wrong once installed. Savings were about 5-6k SEK per client station and year throughout the lifecycle.
Among the exhibitors were; Cortego, who is a systems integrator providing solutions for security and event management. Inserve Technology, a systems integrator and Heimore Group, a solutions provider for security solutions using SSO and IAM
Many thanks to Sun Microsystems for a good event and sponsoring food and beverage.
UPDATE: Find the presentations here
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Widgetbox - Get your own widgets in no time
I have started using Widgetbox widgets and their easy design of your own widgets features. This is a service I recommend for anybody with blogs and/or websites. As an example check out my twitter widget below or at http://www.widgetbox.com/widget/twitter-tlidforss. Don't forget to use your own tags or use your cloud tags for SEO purpose.
Green hat people - A Killer event maker to get people participation
I recently attended as a part of the ongoing Excitera Mobile Cup series in Sweden an event hosted by the Green hat People company. Green hat People does event sevices for mobile phones. Niklas Tyllström, the founder presented the company and organized us into competing groups of users for the event game. You can custom make your own trivia game related to whatever event you are doing or sponsoring as a part of, e.g. a tradeshow. Since we were all in the same office building, there were no location based trivia questions. The game console application monitors all the participants, time, answers and can award users.
I like this service, I think this can be perfectly used for all kinds of events, promotions, games, awards, award points, polls and so on. Head over to the website http://www.greenhatpeople.com/ to read more about them.
Saturday, February 28, 2009
Geek Meet - sIFR (scalable Inman Flash Replacement), Bringing rich typography to the web
I attended the Geek Meet Feb. event at the bwin building in Stockholm. Thanks to Robert Nyman, Mark Wubben was the key speaker. Mark has done a lot of work with sIFR and typography for the web. His topics were;
- sIFR (scalable Inman Flash Replacement) - Bringing rich typography to the web
- Home Made Ubicomp - Ubiquitous computing
Mark presented a quick history of what has happened since the early (1994) days of the web to the problems of today using flash a lot which does not work very well with search engines. Since Mark has uploaded the sIFR presentation to Slideshare, I am embedding his presentation. See below;
Mark also presented briefly the values of easy ubiquitos computing for everybody.
UPDATE: Here are the two urls for Mark's presentations:
http://www.slideshare.net/novemberborn/geek-meet-web-typography-and-sifr-3
http://www.slideshare.net/novemberborn/geek-meet-homemade-ubicomp
Many thanks to bwin (http://www.bwin.com) for sponsoring this event with good food and beverage. Got to check out Texas Hold'em poker.
Also if you are interested in Geek Meet, take a look at Robert's blog: http://www.robertnyman.com
Contact Thomas Lidforss International for your startup business services' needs.
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