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!

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!

MobileFocus2008 - The LTE revolution, mobile multi-media nirvana

“The LTE-revolution” by Mr. X (oops, forgot to write down his name)

Ericsson presented their views on LTE (Long Term Evolution standard):

• Wider pipe
• Flat architecture
• Focus on self optimization and self configuration services in network

Overall goal: Lower the TCO and better radio spectrum flexibility

Converge the LTE/HSPA and LTE/CDMA paths to provide infrastructure that works anywhere in the world. This is a requirement in the present standardization work for release of 3GPP R8

Major operators around the world on board for this strategy; Verizon Wireless, China Mobile, NTT DoCoMo and Vodafone

For those readers that need a technology update, see the Agilent presentation.

LTE Protocol Primer

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: protocol agilent)

Ericsson did not say one word about WiMax, they are clearly pushing for LTE as soon as possible. They are also targeting mobile 150 Mbit/s as a technical goal. I cannot wait until I can get my hands on such a mobile phone.

More from this event will come in newer blog posts from Thomas Lidforss International

MobileFocus2008 - Get Flashy with Flash and new channels for rich mobile multi-media

”Flash in your mobile - channel for a rich multi-media massmarket” by Michael Berman Telenor/Mobilstart and Patrik Nilsson, Adobe

They presented launch of new Rich Internet Applications (RIA) applications and quick snapshot of the history, how we got here;

PS -> PDF -> Flash -> Air (flash/XML/HTML)

Adobe has created an Open Screen Project to promote Adobe Air among other tools (the Creative Suite, CS4 Master Collection is the "Gold" standard to go for). The open Screen Project includes most chip vendors, Verizon Wireless and SonyEricsson among other companies.

Mobilstart is heavily using Adobe applications and together Michael and Patrik showed a really good live demo of verious news (http://www.svd.se http://www.dn.se), weather and sports sites displayed on a mobile phone. Adobe is pushing hard to get away from todays environment where you have to develop mobile phone applications (very time consuming and expensive in the mobile phone developer environment today, with too many phones and too many OS environments). You should also not having to think like a computer user navigating between applications all the time.

Mobilstart by Telenor is offering gateway services for content providers that work with all mobile operators in Sweden, free to sign up and test drive.

More from this event will come in newer blog posts from Thomas Lidforss International

MobileFocus2008 event - Your daily newspaper goes mobile

”The Daily Newspaper goes mobile" - presented by Jan Helin, Aftonbladet, chief editor and publisher, http://www.aftonbladet.se

Jan started by presenting his views on use of mobile phones in Japan. Another interesting comment about the philosophy at Aftonbladet internet, use your gut feeling and decide to do something even if you are not quite sure it will be a big hit. This was the case for introducing scannable tags in the printed newspaper, the "beetagg" project.

Reflections from Japan;

• Simple media business model in Japan
• Too complex and expensive business model for content providers here in Sweden
• UI simplicity, press a button and the service works
• Low flat fee broadband

The "Beetagg project";

Introduce the use of tags for printed media used to get a direct connection with your readers. Importance of taking a strategic decision to go even if you don't know where you will end up

Results;

1. Worlds first paper with a moving image - use tag click on phone ad in paper and get a video on phone
2. Makes an paper article longer - see pictures from an event
3. Have a dialog with the readers - vote on a question
4. Service personalized to your needs - get the updated news for an item
5. Customer clubs and ad solutions - just started this part of the project

What is a "Beetagg"?

Beetagg from Connvision is used for coding, QR and Datamatrix not good enough quality (to use on daily newspaper paper quality), the reader can also as an open solution reader, read these other two open standards. Support is there for secure solutions also where you can verify that use user e.g. only can click once and participate in a survey or buy something.

Some user statistics after the introduction day:

• 45k clients downloaded of which 8k iPhone
• 100 - 1k clicks per tag

Sony, ICA, PhoneHouse leading commercial partners. All Swedes and Swedish companies on the directory website http://www.hitta.se have a tag

Connvision Sweden has a site for design of your own tags for web/blog, see http://www.beetagg.se/

UPDATE: Aftonbladet awarded "the Gold Mobile 2008 (Guldmobilen)" for this project.

http://www.aftonbladet.se/tagga/article3715093.ab

More from this event will come in newer blog posts from Thomas Lidforss International

MobileFocus2008 event - Is mobile content revolution here? Views from Norway

Mikal Rohde, Schibsted, Head of mobile busines, Schibsted Corp. presented, ”Is the content revolution for mobile phones a reality now?”

Mikal represented views from Norway. He started his career with marketing at Netcom, GSM mobile operator in Norway.

Opinions from Mikal:

• The value UIs and ease of use for a user
• Walled garden is a dead concept
• flat-fee reasonably priced data is needed
• more ad paid services
• internet with mobility
• 20k iPhones represents about 50% of all internet traffic vs 5M other phones

UI friendly is the key to success, even the new Nokia's are too hard to use still

Google's strategy with Android+Chrome+AdWords = key indication of a driving direction for the future

Use all advantages of knowing about the user to build useful services, quality on ads needed. The next big wave is ads on the mobile internet and by 2011 $12.8B market according to Gartner group.

More from this event will come in newer blog posts from Thomas Lidforss International

OculusAI - Computer AI for face recognition

Oculus AI is a Swedish startup based i Stockholm that recently won the Sweden Venture Cup award. OculusAI is a new company with a lot of promise in the image and video processing field based on the latest computer research in vision recognition.

Contact Thomas Lidforss International for your startup business services needs.

MobileSorcery - Meet the sorcerers of mobile development tools

Mobile Sorcery is a Swedish startup company focusing on easily enabling making mobile phone applications for J2ME and Symbian environments even if you start out using your standard C/C++ library of software. Mobile Sorcery and the MoSync development tools have been used 100+ mobile devices. I have met with several of the guys behind Mobile Sorcery and I have seen that they live up to their promises. Mobile Sorcery as a company has roots from the mophun mobile game development areas.

Contact Thomas Lidforss International for your startup business services needs.

InView - Ippi an ancient greek mobile messenger

InView is a Swedish startup addressing the need for a convenient way to watch multi-media from mobile phones on a standard TV. This is made possible through the patented consumer interactive device called ippi(tm). Ippi works as a pre-paid mobile phone hooked up to your TV set with a remote control device. The stationary device has the SIM card, USB port, memory and microphone and docks with the remote control. This setup makes it possible for anybody to send an MMS message to you and just like you check for messages on a home voicemail, you check for message on your TV.

I like this concept, the only drawback is a lot of vacationer notice when they get back home after having sent MMS messages from their cameraphones and get the telephone bill, not good with todays pricing from mobile operators, that is something that has got to change. Within the European Union countries it is really crazy. Many countries in Europe are quite small so in many places you go through three or four countries in notime, thus making international MMS mobile phone messages.

As a fallback though, you can use the ippi box as a viewing connector to your mobile phone once you are home and view everything using the remote sitting back in your sofa.

InView as a company is a spinoff of Ericsson Business innovation. Contact Thomas Lidforss International for you business services needs.

myFC - a planar and flexible developed high-efficiency fuel cell

myFC is a very interesting Swedish startup company combining "green- tech with high-tech" to provide the element needed for fuel cell based batteries for power hungry portable devices. Just read about heavy iPhone users using 3G wireless, WiFi, Bluetooth surfing internet and doing social networking and of course talk, you kill the phone battery in no time. myFC has developed a patented process for a flexi fuel cell called FuelCellSticker(TM). The product, myFC 1636 Chip is a 0.5-0.75W modular fuel cell for integration into electronic products like cordless chargers and/or other portable devices.

This is a perfect opportunity for a mobile phone, laptop and accesory product manufacturing company to develop something I think could become very popular. I have personally always wanted to have twice the capacity in laptop and mobile phone batteries, they never last long enough when you need to use them.

Contact Thomas Lidforss International for your business services needs.

VideoPlaza - Cool Interactive online video overlay advertising

This is a very interesting new Swedish startup creating solutions for online video advertising. Videoplaza does provide a solution for your video ad campaigns overlayed on your videos using Flash or Silverlight and works on JW Open source flash player. The users license the use of the platform for serving, managing and presenting ads. There is a flexible web campaign manager allowing to control (CPM, CPC, CPA or time and categorizing/tagging) and targetting your campaign. VideoPlaza is also hosting your ad content.

VideoPlaza has gained a lot of attention from big players and have got companies such as Warner Brothers, GM Opel, H&M and Swedish Cable TV channel5 as users. There are a lot of players in this space trying to do simple monetization schemes from text overlays on Youtube from Google to TV focused companies. The VideoPlaza team I think has got their eyes focused on TV quality ads but in an interactive online environment, good for them.

As always, when it comes to video demo, since I don't have embed code, I recommend you go to the website, http://www.videoplaza.com/ and play the demo. Use the ad control options and also think about pre-, mid- and post-roll of ads in a video plus try the full screen of ad on top of the playing video.

Contact Thomas Lidforss International for your business startup services.

Intertex - make my small business multimedia enabled

Intertex is a Swedish startup addressing the need for simplicity and internet multimedia communications. The company has despite its small size managed to design a set of products with interesting feature comabinations. DSL modem (ADSL 2+ with 23 Mbit/s downlink, 3 Mbit/s uplink) with firewall (SIP ready), router, 802.11 b/g and analog phone ports for old phones. This together with QoS, SIP switch software and VPN pass through will make your office communications be smoothly integrated using internet communications for presence, IM, video and VoIP phone services. The product is also supporting the TR-069 network management specification which lately has been accepted by the femtocell industry group as the standard to use. I think Intertex fully understands that the way to go for the future is simplicity combined with a set of key features most people are using. The biggest reason for why a lof business communications projects fail is that everything should be integrated and you get a solution too complex and too costly to manage.

See easy to compare product overview; http://www.intertex.se/upfiles/ModelOverview.pdf

Contact me at http://www.lidforss.com/contactus.aspx for help in analyzing your business needs

Voolife - Multimedia Twitter in Swedish

This is my Voolife page. Voolife is like a Swedish Twitter. Voolife has a pretty clean interface and does access to Twitter and Jaiku. Voolife does have interesting features for mobile users such as support for pictures and videoclips as well as geo-tagging of your info. This is another service that specifically is thinking about and using location based info to provide something different than Twitter.

Quick animation of how BloggKoll.com is working

Here's a follow up on BloggKoll. Animation for non-techies.

BloggKoll - Like Twellow for blogs with a FriendFeed twist

I have started using Bloggkoll just out of simplicity in addition to using RSS readers. With Bloggkoll, you can find, categorize and subscribe to the blogs you frequently read without having to look for RSS feeds or addresses. It is a pretty convenient web service for most people who don't want to having to think, "How do I read and subscribe to my favorite blogs?". I have to say congratulations to a friend of mine, Mattias Swenson and the team for launching this service.

Callcontrol - a new handy mobile personal call control service

Here's a first post from posts about "StartMeUp - Sweden". Aurora Innovation is a new Swedish company introducing their Callcontrol service in addition to TeleQ, the contact center management service used a lot by healthcare service providers.

Calcontrol is a handy little service allowing you to better control how you want to answer incoming calls to your mobile phone. Instead of just answering or letting it go to voicemail, you can choose from a menu how the call should be answered and if you decide to give the calling party a message such as I will call you back in 1 hour, you can get reminded through SMS, 5 min before you need to call.

The service works on Windows Mobile, Symbian and as a SIM-card service.

Contact me for help in contacting Swedish startups.