Memories from Living in Oslo, Norway

I have compiled pictures into a video using Sony VAIO® Movie Creator software for the first time. It works nicely. Unfortunately the exported file sizes are getting really big if you want HD or even worse full HD quality.

This video (5 min and 30 sec) in 480p video quality is 119 MB, the 720p HD is 343 MB (not uploaded). The above video runs from my OneDrive account.

Have a great weekend you all wherever you are in the World!

Contact me if you would like consulting services

LinkedIn sales training - Discover More Leads at Your Target Accounts

Discover More Leads at Your Target Accounts from LinkedIn Sales Solutions

This is a new service recently released for premium users with Sales navigator accounts. Check it out, works very well to get more leads into an account. 

You should be following the LinkedIn sales training blog. 
See http://training.linkedin.com/sales


Do you want more sales? Then contact Thomas Lidforss International for a discussion. 

Review of The Definitive Guide to Lead Nurturing - A Marketo Workbook

Marketo's - Definitive Guide-to-lead-nurturing from Sanford Diday

Marketo is a very interesting company focusing on lead to revenue software and tools to efficiently handle potentials customers and interaction between your sales and marketing people. Here's a quick summary and some highlights:

At Marketo, all incoming leads are scored using a combination based on:

• lead source 
• demographics
• activities

Scores with:

• less than 65 points require further nurturing -> prospects 
• more than 65 points pass on to sales for further qualification -> leads

Marketo is using:

• Use single opt-in for leads that have filled out a web form
• Use double opt-in for others, follow up, if no response, suspend in database

After the opt-in welcome, present an option to accelerate the communications.

An example of a possible buying cycle:

If the buying cycle for your product is threemonths, your lead nurturing path might look like this:

• Day 1 - Follow-up with introductory email
• Day 10 - Email offering new content related to first download and subsequent Web site activity
• Day 15 - Personal email from sales rep
• Day 30 - Email best practices whitepaper
• Day 45 - Call from sales rep to ‘check in’
• Day 60 - Email promoting webinar series
• Day 75 - Personal email from sales rep offering a product demo
• Day 85 - Call from sales rep to schedule in-person meeting
• Day 90 - Send sales proposal via email


Marketo’s nurturing program has four main roles:

• marketing manager 
• marketing executive
• sales rep
• agency

And three main buying stages:

• early stage awareness
• middlestage consideration
• latestage evaluation.

There are over 50 pieces of nurturing content spread across those roles and stages, so the typical prospect will receive between 10 and 30 total touches across the nurturing programs.

Make the Most Out of Trigger-based Marketing

• Web pages: visiting the page on your Web site that explains how to buy
• Content: downloading content you’ve marked as being relevant to later stage buyers
• Email: opening every email you send
• Scoring: If a prospect is “stuck” at the same score with no recent activity, it may be time to try a different approach or offer


Use of Accelerator campaigns in two ways.

1) When Prospects reach a specific threshold lead score that indicates interest but then stall out before making it all the way to becoming “sales ready”, we trigger a series of high value offers intended to spark re-engagement.

2) We watch for specific behaviors that indicate when we should move a prospect from Early Stage nurturing to Mid-Stage, or Mid-Stage nurturing to Late Stage.

There are three important categories of Lead Lifecycle campaigns:
• Lead Handoff
• Lead Recycling
• New Customers

Calculating the ROI of Lead Nurturing

Before Nurturing
A: Won Opportunities from Leads Under 30 days old - Number A

B: Won Opportunities from Leads Over 30 days old - Number B

C: Won Opportunities Total Marketing-Generated - Number C


If B > A, you are nurturing well (or possibly not generating enough new leads).

If not, subtract A – B to get the number of extra marketing-generated won opportunities you might expect from better lead nurturing.

Calculate (A – B) / C to measure the % increase in total marketing-generated revenue from better lead nurturing at your company.



The common result is that with nurturing you increase number B generating an overall higher C.




Do you want more sales? Then contact Thomas Lidforss International for a discussion.

Do you want to attract more customer with inbound content marketing?

How to Attract More Customers With Content Using Hubspot from HubSpot All-in-one Marketing Software

This HubSpot's now 5 year old guide on Inbound marketing, still very valid. HubSpot has now more than 4000 customers. I can recommend studying and applying for your business.
 
Do you want more sales? Then contact Thomas Lidforss International for a discussion.

Christmas Blog Wish from Stockholm to Oslo

I have decided to make a long wish list of to do items updating my blog and start blogging regularly again. The focus of this blog will change. I will keep you all posted.

Merry Christmas/Happy Holidays! eller God Jul/God Helg!

GWC presentation about the GMIC 2010 conference about mobile internet in China

The GWC (the Great Wall Club) of China has published a presentation from the GMIC 2010 event in Beijing earlier this year. This presentation high-lights a number of interesting points about the differences in local consumer and business behavior that you have in China vs. USA/Europe. 


Some key points:

• Everything is focused around micro-payments
• Very little use of credit cards
• A wide variety of competing services, not like here, focus on one Facebook, one Google, one Ebay...
• Extensive use of buying virtual goods
• Profitable companies through the massive user base, 800+ million mobile phones, 400+ million internet users

See presentation below;

Chinnovations on China's new media

View more presentations from Mobile Internet Great Wall Club.

Thomas Lidforss International provides business management services for development of companies and new markets. Contact us.

Excellent presentation on how to bridge business strategy and your brand

The Brand Gap

View more presentations from coolstuff.

Check out this presentation from Marty Neumeier and Neutron LLC in San Francisco.

Thomas Lidforss International provides business management services for clients and service providers who are interested in mobile, VAS, IT outsourcing services. Get yours today!

Sweden National Day - June 6, 2010 and Start of Love Stockholm festival (updated)

Today on the Sweden National Day, the Love Stockholm 2010 Festival begins and will continue for two weeks. See http://beta.stockholmtown.com/en/ for tips on what to do if you get an opportunity to visit Stockholm or if you are already here on this beautiful sunny day.

Google is also celebrating by having a special image for the day.

Updated with pictures!

Thomas Lidforss International provides business management services for clients and service providers who are interested in mobile, VAS, IT outsourcing services. Get yours today!

Dennis Gabor celebrated by Google today - The man behind the holographic images

In case your have noticed the "strange" Google image today, you may want to read the Wikipedia article, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Gabor

Dennis would have been 110 years old today...

Thomas Lidforss International provides business management services for clients and service providers who are interested in mobile, VAS, IT outsourcing services. Get yours today, contact http://www.lidforss.com/contactus.aspx

Me On TV and Bar-Deli at the TIE Nordic - SSE Open Mike event for startups Stockholm

I attended the TIE Nordic event (http://nordic.tie.org/) organized by Hannes Dernehl jointly hosted by SSE organized by Bhavik (http://swedishstartups.ning.com/profile/NordicEntrepreneursNetwork) at the Hub (http://stockholm.the-hub.net/) in Stockholm on May 31.

Neev Technologies Nordic AB (http://www.neevtech.com) is a member of TIE Nordic. Contact tlidforss at neevtech.com for more info about IT outsourcing services provided.



Jeffrey Cole from Ericsson was there presenting the new service Me On TV where the general idea is to encourage businesses to start using user generated content (UGC) for product development and customer services by providing tools to make it as easy as possible for users to record, edit and mix info to be used using their mobile phones. See the Youtube video below for more details.

These events are covered by Open Entrepreneurship (http://www.openentrepreneurship.com/), Björn Paulsson the TIE Nordic Chapter Manager video records and posts on their site. I can recommend registering and signing up at this site if you are interesting in the start up business areas.

One interesting start-up presenting during the "Open Mike" session (where anybody can grab the microfone and present something) was Bar-Deli. See http://www.bar-deli.se/ for more info. The entire business case is very simple, go to any bar in hotels, pubs, restaurants in any city or country
and ask what snacks you can get. The answer in most cases is nothing put peanuts. So, as a result bar-deli packages, sells and delivers custom snacks that are different and healthier. I talked to Niclas Johansson the founder, you can contact him at niclas at bar-deli.se.


Thomas Lidforss International provides mobile, VAS, IT outsourcing services for clients and service providers, get yours today!

The Fierce15 - Top Wireless winners for 2010 from FierceWireless.com

Here's the fresh list of companies appointed winners this year by FierceWireless magazine. Read the full article at this address;

http://www.fiercewireless.com/special-reports/fiercewireless-fierce-15-2010

or check out each one of the companies below;

- AirHop Communications - Top Wireless Company 2010: FierceWireless, Fierce 15

- Bump Technologies - Top Wireless Company 2010: FierceWireless, Fierce 15

- ComiXology - Top Wireless Company 2010: FierceWireless, Fierce 15

- Dashwire - Top Wireless Company 2010: FierceWireless, Fierce 15

- Full Spectrum - Top Wireless Company 2010: FierceWireless, Fierce 15

- Ground Truth - Top Wireless Company 2010: FierceWireless, Fierce 15

- Harbinger Capital Partners - Top Wireless Company 2010: FierceWireless, Fierce 15

- Illume Software - iZup - Top Wireless Company 2010: FierceWireless, Fierce 15

- Open Kernel Labs - Top Wireless Company 2010: FierceWireless, Fierce 15

- Powermat - Top Wireless Company 2010: FierceWireless, Fierce 15

- SpiderCloud Wireless - Top Wireless Company 2010: FierceWireless, Fierce 15

- Swype - Top Wireless Company 2010: FierceWireless, Fierce 15

- Ubidyne - Top Wireless Company 2010: FierceWireless, Fierce 15

- Validas - Top Wireless Company 2010: FierceWireless, Fierce 15

- Vitality - Top Wireless Company 2010: FierceWireless, Fierce 15

Thomas Lidforss International provides mobile, VAS, IT outsourcing services for clients and service providers, get yours today!

Mobile High-tech along the ski tracks of Vasaloppet 2010

Mobile high-tech along the ski tracks of Vasaloppet. I wonder if the old king of Sweden, Gustav Vasa could have imagined that 490 years later, you can as a skier following live streaming on your mobile what is happening up front in the 90 km ski race on your mobile while you are skiing. But thanks to http://svtplay.se/t/107631/vasaloppet services you can in the year 2010, RFID and GPS services combined with video streaming makes this the high-tech race for sure. It was funny to see and hear a guy with starting number 8600 something to talk about the front skiers with Tynell in the lead becasue he watched it on his mobile phone.

I think this is just the beginning of what is to come, just wait until 4G LTE services are widely available.

Google Sweden is also celebrating the 86th Vasaloppet race by a special logo today.

Would you like to get the best IT project deals? Contact me asap! http://tinyurl.com/yjgqmxo

Projectplace - Collaboration around your projects in the cloud

Here's an overdue post about the growing popularity of cloud services. Projectplace sponsored in cooperation with SalesForce an event to highlight the status of project and collaboration services.

Niklas Zandelin, CEO, Exido talked about enablers such as service buses and a core focus on cloud services allowing processes between all actors. Cloud SLA documents are also now available within the EU and US markets. And recent trends with CFOs who all want to see no CAPex and only modest OPex.

Johan Zetterstrom VP Nordics, SalesForce.com presented the growth and history of SalesForce. He emphasized that at Salesforce you pay per user not apps used. Projectplace is a salesforce app on the app platform.

The scope of SalesForce with their AppForce;
- 125k apps on app platform.
- Service cloud with 6k customer.
The first 100 developers can develop for free first app.

Magnus Ingvarsson, Magnus.Ingvarsson at projectplace.se, Founder of Projectplace.

Projectplace after 2008
- 105 employees
- 129 MSEK revenue
- 18 MSEK ebit result

Magnus illiustrated how Projectplace sees cloud services vs. their project services;

PaaS (Platform as a service) is a vertical one addressing the app layer scope
IaaS (Infrastructure as a service) is the horizontal infrastructure layer
Integration as a service is the vertical management layer
Apps are of course the apps on the PaaS layer
UI
SaaS (Software as a Service) is what the users see and use

There are as he pointed out, of course a certain way of getting sold on a certain architecture. Each one of the major cloud services architectures has their own way of interworking between apps, similar but still slightly different meaning that once you have chosen an environment to use, you have work to do if you would like to change later.

Projectplace also sess a role for their project cloud services as a good fit for BPO services where you have a need for local and remote project management and that you should when you consider cloud services, see the whole picture from on premises, host outsource, cloud and SaaS.

Would you like to get the best IT project deals? Contact me asap! http://tinyurl.com/yjgqmxo

The MJ Launcher part2 - Transforming Your Mobile Experience see updated info in previous post

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.

Contact Thomas Lidforss International for select representation and management of business partner and outsourcing services!

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!

How to make real money out of virtual money in your virtual world

Virtual Worlds and Entrepreneurship _Teigland

View more presentations from Robin Teigland.

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;

• http://Crd.gov.cn
• http://www.Hipihi.com

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

Contact Thomas Lidforss International for select representation and management of business partner and outsourcing services!

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!

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...

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

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.pdf

Clare 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

Mikael Karlsson, Managing Director and Fund Manager presented the newly created ALMI Invest.

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

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

Update on Windows Mobile Marketplace launch event in Stockholm

Windows Marketplace for Mobile Developer Registration Walk Through

View more presentations from Mike Francis.

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/kr9m8h

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%

See for more information the Windows Mobile blog;
http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/windowsphone/default.aspx

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