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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.

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

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.

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.