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.

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

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

http://www.telia.se/privat/produkter_tjanster/internet/mobiltbredband/?sl=privat_produkter_tjanster_internet_mobiltbredband

http://www.telenor.se/privat/mobilt-bredband/index.html

http://www.tre.se/templates/BroadbandShop/Storefront.aspx?id=33857&csref=fps_3bredband

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

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

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:

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

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!

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Contact Thomas Lidforss Internatinal for your business startup services' needs.

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.

Contact Thomas Lidforss International for your startup business services' needs.

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;

Bringing Typography to the Web with sIFR 3 at <head>

View more presentations from Mark Wubben. (tags: headconference typopgraphy)

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.

HTC Touch 2 with Windows Mobile 6.5 - A preview of better things to come

Windows Mobile 6.5 Running on HTC from Jesus Diaz on Vimeo.

HTC understood early that you have to do something with the standard Windows Mobile user interface. HTC created their TouchFlo UI that makes a nice frontend to Windows Mobile. Microsoft has improved a lot the basic UI with the new release 6.5.

HTC has thus improved their TouchFlo with the new HTC Touch 2. I like this phone and I think HTC is finally getting there. So, right now I think the competition is on between HTC, LG and Samsung for who makes the best Windows Mobile based mobile smartphone.

See the video for a demo of the new Touch with Windows Mobile 6.5.

Contact Thomas Lidforss International for your startup business services' needs.

Getting it right the right way with the Garmin-Asus G60 smartphone

Garmin G60 Hands On from Jesus Diaz on Vimeo.

It is interesting to see that when a company is focusing on user-friendliness and use technology as an enabler, you usually end up with a pretty good product. I think the new Garmin-Asus G60 is one such example, following Palm Pre's philosophy.

Look at the demo video of the Garmin-Asus G60, the new Linux based smartphone focusing on using location as en enabler not as a feature you as an user have to think about. Location services as a feature is in this case just used to provide a richer experience with the applications most people use. I think the new cooperation between Asus and Garmin will become a successful company with mobile smart devices.

Contact Thomas Lidforss International for your startup business services' needs.

Microblog vs. Blog, nanoblogg or macroblog, Where is blogging heading?

I have noticed being in Sweden which is a blog-heavy country that people have got infected with the idea of blogging in every size or shape or whereever you are. A couple of weeks ago, when Google announced their saving plans for the company by e.g. shutting down the Finnish acquisition of Jaiku the Finnish mobile microblogging company and transforming it into an open source based solution service. Then Morris Packer at Bonnier media started pushing for Swedish Jaiku users to start using the new Swedish microblogging service Bloggy created by Jonas Lejon and then microblogging really took off in Sweden not just on Bloggy but also on Twitter since most people on Bloggy also have noticed Twitter without using it that much.

Now other services are also taking off, such as "What can you say with one word?" such as the new Nanoblogging site http://nanoblogg.se/tlidforss which works to emulate Bloggy's success but for even shorter blogs. This new service has recently picked up more than 400 users in a couple of days. Recently, people have stared mciroblogging about that they ned 2000 characters at least to say something meaningful raising the question about the need for a macroblog service? I like all the comments and think that this goes all way back to the starting of websites that ended up being too difficult to manage and maintain, then the first blogs came around and much later mobile phone updates and need for short updates. And now finally back to the beginning again.

Hmm, technology is amazing, we seem to go in circles sometimes...maybe it is time to learn from history and check out of internet for a while.

For all twitter and bloggers, also be aware of #blmon on Twitter and http://www.bloggersmonday.com/

Contact Thomas Lidforss International for your startup business services needs'

Outsourcing and 2009 - Some interesting thoughts, Neev It with Neev Nordica

Neev Nordica Explore Benefits Safe Outsourcing

View more presentations from Thomas Lidforss. (tags: denmark norge)

Neev Nordica, a Neev Technologies company is an outsourced product development company providing flexible methods for development and partnership. Rich internet applications, Java, Flex, AWS, Web 2.0, mobile applications, web portals and SNS software.

I read an interesting report from http://www.equaterra.com regarding the expected development for outsourcing and in particular ICT areas (software and communications).
India will still be the lead due to their competence, language, culture and experience regardless of pricing.

I think that management at companies getting into outsourcing really need to think wider than just money or cost. It is a choice where you can make strategic advantages to outbeat the competition in particular during a recession we have now in the world.

Here's a presentation about the creative new Neev Nordica available in the nordic region of the EU area.

Please contact us for further discussions and information about what we can do to your bottom line and competitiveness now in 2009.

PS. A quick update; was told the following about this presentation; "Your slideshow has been featured on the SlideShare homepage by our editorial team.
Cheers,
- the SlideShare team"

Twitter for the nobodies - Vizedu has done it again

I really like the Vizedu presentations. They are always straight to the point. This time they have four new ones posted, here is a good one about how to use Twitter.




Contact Thomas Lidforss International for your startups business services needs'.

Kilobyte confusion - Which one do you like?

Since I cannot get the embedded object to work in my browser, here's the url; http://www.smartoons.net/comic.php?c=269 and a snapshot:

I like the cartoons from http://www.smartoons.net

Contact Thomas Lidforss International for your startup business services' needs

Google GrandCentral 2.0 - The new way of using your phones soon available

I read with interest the blog update from http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/ about soon to be released the GrandCentral 2.0 service. I liked GrandCentral's services long before Google acquired them. I also hope that once out of beta this service will become available outside USA. I think Google search on voice mail, web widgets and 1 click calling straight from the browser on your mobile phone together with 4G mobile VoIP will finally dramtically change what you consider a "phone" to be.

Contact Thomas Lidforss International for your startup business services' needs.

How to be trendy - Obamaize yourself

This is a new service jumping in on the Obama marketing trend. Check out http://obamiconme.com, simple but powerful, just upload an image, play with the tool, contrast, color balance and bingo, you have created your "Obamaized" image ready to be used as an avatar or an a coffee mug.

See results before and after the tool.

Contact Thomas Lidforss International for your startup business services' needs