Thomas Lidforss - The DealMaker: March 2009

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;

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outsourcing services!

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.

Contact Thomas Lidforss Interntional for select reprensentation and management of outsourcing services!

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.

Contact Thomas Lidforss International for select reprensentation and management of outsourcing services!

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

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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.

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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.

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