Nicolai Wadstrom

Newsweek, seriously?

Nicolai Wadstrom — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 17:46:45 +0000

Newsweek, seriously?

Yesterday Newsweek published a provocative article by Rob Cox, called “The Ruthless Overlords of Silicon Valley.” It is about the entrepreneurs that created companies, and did share the spoils generously with employees to create more millionaires than anybody in history.

Behind the hoodies and flip-flops lurk businesspeople as rapacious as the black-suited and top-hatted industrialists of the late-19th century. Like their predecessors in railroads, steel, banking, and oil a century ago, Silicon Valley’s new entrepreneurs are harnessing technology to make the world more efficient. But along the way, that process is bringing great economic and labor dislocation, as well as an unequal share of the spoils.

Rob Cox builds his argument around the deconstruction of Silicon Valley’s moralism, as embodied by Google’s “Don’t be evil” motto, and compare them to the Tycoons of the late 19th century. He fails to recognize, that the Tycoons earned their spoils through opposition to workplace safety, poverty-level salaries and corruption. Larry page may be a demanding boss, but Google isn’t asking its employees to risk their lives and are Facebook employees living in rat-infested houses?

On the contrary the employees in these companies are the best paid workers in their field on the planet, and these companies share more ownership in their companies than anywhere else. Coming from (a slightly more socialistic) Europe, employee equity is close to non existent, and they way every company in Silicon Valley share equity with their employees is positively shocking to any left-wing european I talk to.

Cox, has no knowledge or distinction of apples and oranges, he compares (“old” hardware companies such as) Apple with the new bread of Internet companies, thus allowing him to introduce the various abuses perpetrated by Chinese manufacturer Foxconn. Apple may be as hip as today’s Internet startups, but they are not even in the same breed (no bashing please, I am a big fan of Apple’s products).

It’s an attempt of guilt by association, and an terribly bad one at that.

Read the article, be appaled and Tweet your appellation to the world!

Thanks Dan Primack, for pointing me to this!

Prezi CEO, Co-founder and friend Peter Arvai talk about health care

Nicolai Wadstrom — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 23:51:30 +0000

Proposing a DNS record for Maven repositories

Nicolai Wadstrom — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 03:13:08 +0000

If you know all about Maven skip down to A DNS Record for Maven Repositories

Most people that do software development and/or deployment on environments that run on the JVM (Java Virtual Machine), have come across Apache Maven (or tools such as Apache Ivy that interface with Maven repositories), and know that it is a great tool for managing dependencies for applications. Most Open Source and commercial (or semi-commercial) software packages and modules offer public Maven repositories to get the components (and the right versions of them) automatically downloaded when you are building/assembling your application.

There is also challenges, such as Maven allows you to declare dependencies, and automatically resolve dependencies in third party modules, but what if that particular module is not available in the public Maven repository, where can you find it? You often end up googling for things like “+org.restlet +maven +repository” to find where that particular module is published and downloadable for Maven, and adding that repository either to the build files (for Maven, Ivy etc) or to your maven settings in your home directory.

I think this could be done much more automated, and thus I am proposing an introduction of a DNS record to expose Maven repositories and have Maven (and other tools that use Maven repositories) be able to resolve these repository end-points automatically.

A DNS Record for Maven Repositories

The standard I propose would make it easy for anybody, open source project or commercial software company, to publish a pointer to a Maven Repository (and it can even be fully or partially protected for commercial modules) through a simple DNS entry, and then have Maven automatically resolve that repository.

The whole idea is to allow the owners of an domain to declare a pointer in their DNS that tells Maven where to find the Maven Repository associated with that domain.

This is an example DNS record of how to declare a Maven Repository (this would be part of the DNS zone file):

@ 3600 IN TXT "maven-repository=http://nicolaiwadstrom.com/maven2/"

Try this for my domain, in a Mac OS X, Linux or Windows terminal/command prompt enter:

nslookup -type=txt nicolaiwadstrom.com

This should give a response as follows:

Server: 172.16.1.1
Address: 172.16.1.1#53

Non-authoritative answer:
nicolaiwadstrom.com text = "maven-repository=http://nicolaiwadstrom.com/maven2/"

This would in the standard I propose here, tell Maven that for all packages with an Maven Group ID (or organization identifier) of “com.nicolaiwadstrom”, the primary repository is located at “http://nicolaiwadstrom.com/maven2/”.

Security

We always reverse the the Maven Group ID (or Organization in other words), we are always asking the authority (owner of that domain/DNS, such as nicolaiwadstrom.com) for the packages that are part of “com.nicolaiwadstrom”.

This do not mean that we fix any existing problems with man-in-the-middle DNS attacks, but we do not introduce additional security issues (as anybody in the middle can spoof any existing Maven repositories, such as the central Maven repository). Existing standards such as DNS Sec should be used to address those concerns.

Extensions

Multiple repositories with priorities. This standard would typically need to support multiple repositories to support fail-over etc. Proposed format for this would be to have multiple DNS entries, and prepend the priority such as:

@ 3600 IN TXT "maven-repository=10;http://maven1.nicolaiwadstrom.com/maven2/"

@ 3600 IN TXT "maven-repository=20;http://maven2.nicolaiwadstrom.com/maven2/"

@ 3600 IN TXT "maven-repository=30;http://maven3.nicolaiwadstrom.com/maven2/"

This would be resolved as 3 different URL’s for this Maven repository, top priority is “http://maven1.nicolaiwadstrom.com/maven2/”, if that can’t be reached (or does not contain the component, or version referenced), “http://maven2.nicolaiwadstrom.com/maven2/” should be tried and finally “http://maven3.nicolaiwadstrom.com/maven2/”. This also allows open source projects that are available in the central Maven repository to point to that as a primary resource, and have lookups fail-over back to their own servers.

Startup Product Feedback: Unlimited Cloud Storage

Nicolai Wadstrom — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 00:55:19 +0000

I see a lot of different startup ideas, concepts and early-stage products every week. Here is one that emerged recently, that I would like to get some feedback on!

It is in the kind of crowded Cloud Storage spaces, but it seems that it is also an quickly and ever growing need combined with an area with room for innovation.

Please share your thoughts on if you would buy this product:

Unlimited storage Cloud Drive
1GByte upload per month
All data stored on multiple secure datacenter locations.
First version support for local sync client that can be installed on multiple computers (Windows & OS X, and Linux at some point).
Roadmap has clients that will support selective synchronization.
Roadmap has support for client side encryption etc (maybe as an additional monthly fee in a premium version).
Price $5/month

The idea is that we have nowhere to put our increasing digital library that has all of our stuff, from source codes, to video clips, photos, or just all of our files…

All and any thoughts and feedback is greatly appreciated. What is your killer needs for Cloud Storage that you would like to see solved?

Why Amazon EC2 CPU Steal Time does not work (well) for Web apps

Nicolai Wadstrom — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 17:00:23 +0000

Compute Virtualization (such as EC2) works by dividing the physical machine (and thus the CPU) into many virtual machines, that each get served a slice of the physical machine (a high performance CPU with 4 cores might get divided into 8 virtual machines for example). To keep the total available compute power fair between the virtualized machines (while allowing virtualized machines make use of additional unused CPU cycles), something called CPU steal time was invented (by IBM I believe, that invited the whole concept of Virtual Machines).

Many web servers for many startups and companies in the world run on Amazon EC2. But during the past year (I believe, I have no clear evidence when they started this), Amazon EC2 started to change how they prioritize CPU cycles for the virtualized machine instances they offer as part of their Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

Amazon started to use a more “batch workload” geared prioritization model for their CPU instances (mainly micro and small from what I have seen) instances. Batch type division of CPU resources are not suited for real-time tasks such as a Web server, why? Keep reading.

Batch workloads vs. Real-time workloads

The batch workload model looks at a task (or a multitude of tasks) to run until completion, and for a batch style job if it runs fairly fast for the first hour and at 50% (of the CPU capacity) the second hour is quite ok, vs running the jobs at 75% for 2 hours. It will not affect the overall performance or completion time for processing those batch jobs (as long as the total allotted CPU time is the same). For most batch model jobs it is even ok if they are able to burst CPU usage (over the allotted CPU time) for periods of heavy usage, and then penalized (run at perhaps 20% of the “normal” speed), again total amount of CPU available to process the jobs is what is important.

For real-time workloads it is quite different, take a web server if it runs at adequate speed for 3 hours, and then there is heavy usage (it can make use of a burst of additional CPU cycles), but if it happens at the cost of 25% of “adequate” performance level being available for 1 hour it will adversely effect how well your web server can server web pages For most situations that are real-time, or semi real-time like web servers, it is often better to have a constant available CPU performance (more or less, with very little penalization of steal time). And add more machines as needed.

Why does this matter? And how is the virtualized model different from physical ones? Because there is no “steal time” to make up for overage usage from your virtual machine.

What I have seen with EC2 lately is that they do these type of 1h long penalizations from overage usage or over allotment. And often to an extent where the web servers almost stop responding.

I wish Amazon either would step back to the old model of how they prioritize CPU usage (which still use the steal time model, but never got “Steal Times” of 90% ore more for 2 hours+) or… Give me more control over how this is done.

Right now I am considering starting to move servers away from Amazon EC2 (in spite of all the benefits) just for this reason.

The Riskmaster, featuring Tim Draper

Nicolai Wadstrom — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 00:17:49 +0000

This is not new, but was looking for Songs related to Entrepreneurship, and remembered this with Tim Draper, still a lot of kudos Tim!

Reinventing IT – Clayton M. Christensen @ Gartner Symposium 2011

Nicolai Wadstrom — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 22:00:23 +0000

Clayton M. Christensen talks about “Reinventing IT”, a must read book, and talk to watch for any Entrepreneur wanting disrupt.. Just about anything. Or rather understand why big established markets can be disrupted.

(You need to have Silverlight installed for the presentation to be displayed properly)

Courtesy of Gartner Group.

Build Hybrid Clouds with Witsbits

Nicolai Wadstrom — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 19:10:14 +0000

Fresh from the Witsbits blog:

Yesterday we snuck out a new major release* of Witsbits! We are very exited about it, please check it out and send us your comments about it!

A major upgrade is the Hosted Private Cloud feature. You can now rent servers from your favorite service provider directly from within the management console.

*If you already use Witsbits you don’t need to do anything, you are already upgraded.

USE WITSBITS TO BUILD:

Private Cloud (on-premise) – your own servers – no software!
Hosted Private Cloud – rent the servers you need directly from a service provide of your choice!
Hybrid Cloud – combine on-premise servers and hosted/rented servers!

CHECK IT OUT

HOSTING PROVIDERS

Are you a Hosting Provider? Please contact me if you would like to offer your servers through Witsbits.com. It’s very easy to set it up.

Stay Snappy,
Mikael

* If you already use Witsbits you don’t need to do anything, you are already upgraded.

How to succeed in Silicon Valley @ Innovate Sweden event at Stanford

Nicolai Wadstrom — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 00:01:01 +0000

A short presentation on some key things about connecting to the Silicon Valley eco-system, that I presented at Stanford this Wednesday (2nd of November 2011) at the Innovative Sweden event.

Startup Chile meet-up in Mountain View

Nicolai Wadstrom — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 22:20:20 +0000

The Startup Chile program, is the best effort I have seen to “clone” Silicon Valley, by any country or region. It’s a really smart and exciting idea.
What they do is giving away $40,000 grants over the next 4 years (to 1,000 entrepreneurs) to early stage startups willing to move to Chile for 6 months and work on their startup.

If you’re mobile, and low on cash, it’s one of the best sources of early funding available to startups. You give up _no_ equity in exchange for the money. The first round they had around 150 applications for 40 slots, so chances of getting in are good.

And, you’re guaranteed to be around a ton of other cool startups and entrepreneurs from all over the world willing to put it all on the line and move to Chile to get their startup off the ground.

They have an event at the Hackers Dojo, make sure to go there if interested!

They are having an informational meetup this Thursday at the Dojo.

We’re on the road again in California looking for the best and brightest entrepreneurs in the world and if you think you’ve got what it takes to garner US$40k of equity-free seed capital from Start-Up Chile for your global startup, don’t miss this opportunity!

This meetup will feature general information about the program (which Vivek Wadhwa calls a “ grand innovation experiment”) that has paved the way for a worldwide innovation revolution. We’ll explain in detail what it’s like to bootstrap from Chile and how you can become part of the initiative by applying right now, before the August 11th deadline.

New York Times: Zerply: A Non-Corporate LinkedIn, Built For and By the Web Generation

Nicolai Wadstrom — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 19:01:13 +0000

Great article about Zerply in the New York Times:

Despite its recent IPO, there’s a strong feeling among many people online that the professional network LinkedIn doesn’t quite work for them. Despite its millions of users, it isn’t necessarily easy to find people on LinkedIn that you’d want to work for you. And just as importantly, young people in particular feel as though you have to “put on a suit and tie and become part of a corporate structure” in order to participate.

Read the full article here

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Dave McClure invests in Zerply!

Nicolai Wadstrom — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 01:02:52 +0000

Great news, that have already appeared in a few places across the web: We are very happe to share that Dave McClure is now investing in Zerply!

Congratulations Christofer, Taaniel and the rest of the team!

Zerply will also work with the 500 Startups program, which will greatly help Zerply accelerate their momentum. BootstrapLabs and the advisory team here will continue to support Zerply moving forward, and we are all very excited about having Dave McClure and 500 Startups involved with Zerply!

Read more here:

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European Startup Demo Night in San Francisco

Nicolai Wadstrom — Fri, 27 May 2011 18:43:55 +0000

BootstrapLabs, in collaboration with PariSoma, is looking for three European startups that are ready to come to Silicon Valley to participate in the European Startup Demo Night in San Francisco on July 21st.

The European Startup Demo Night is an invitation only event, that will match a select group of 10 startups with an audience of over 40 investors. Many leading angels and venture capitalists will be in attendance – among the anticipated audience: DFJ, Bessemer, Intel Capital, Accel, Trident and Google Ventures among many others.

All of these investors focus on early stage venture capital and/or angel rounds.

BootstrapLabs will select 3 candidates based on presentation, product / technology, team, and market potential. Candidates who are selected will be allowed to give a 4 minute presentation, followed by a 4 minute Q&A at the event in San Francisco.

Participating companies will be responsible for all costs during the trip.

Requirements:

European startups looking to raise an early stage round in Silicon Valley
Roadmap that includes going to Silicon Valley
You must be able to come an present in Silicon Valley at the event on July 21st.
Product focus in IT, Internet, Software, Cloud, SaaS, Digital Media.

Reach out to us here.

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The Startup Visa – crucial for Silicon Valley!

Nicolai Wadstrom — Thu, 19 May 2011 16:01:32 +0000

The Startup Visa has been on it’s way to legislation since last year, the Startup Visa had been first introduced in the US Senate in 2010 but was allowed to expire. Now it’s time again, and I hope it will become legislation, because if there is one single thing I learned about what makes Silicon Valley what it is, it’s the constant influx of people from all over the world.

And if that can be increased we will see even more things happen here in Silicon Valley, and it will fuel the recovery of the US economy with both jobs and economic growth. It is the one single thing that the US can do to increase it’s competative advantage in the global economy.

I support the Startup Visa, as it will help many of the entrepreneurs I work with every day, read more about it here, in an interview by the Economic Times.

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It’s not the technology, stupid!

Nicolai Wadstrom — Mon, 16 May 2011 07:05:01 +0000

There is a trend and a lot talk about Digital Distraction Disorder (on the web of course), and a lot of people saying things like:

“I don’t want technology…”
“I don’t like technology… “
“Sometimes I just want to be disconnected and have no technology”

I am all for disconnecting from our always on, always connected lifestyle, and be filled with other senses than what get’s streamed over an Internet connection. And I do think this lifestyle creates unhealthy situations for some people. I do think there are real problems in our inability to manage the opportunities presented in a meaningful and healthy way.

However, I am quite tired of the discussion that our “technology” is the root of these problems. This is really about culture and lifestyle, and not about technology. The technology is what you make of it.

And almost everything around us is technology, it’s technology that puts a roof over our head, food on the table, the paper books that we read (yes Gutenberg’s printing press was technology as well), the piano, the violin and even our cloths on our bodies are technology. With-out any tech we would be living in caves (and no we wouldn’t have fire or anything to hunt with…

What have happened in the past 10 to 20 years is that we now a technology so vastly more powerful, with so much potential that we don’t really (yet) know how to deal with it.

I think the discussion should be about how we harness and use the opportunities presented by all this new technology better (and better means healthy, life quality improving ways), not how we cut down on using technology. That is a western’s romantic dreams of a simpler lifestyle, that unfortunately in reality either means you need to be really rich or decent to poverty and a lower quality of life. Many don’t realize that the biggest gain in quality of life and health comes from technology and the resulting increase in efficiency in our society. Look at how technology in 100 years radically transformed agriculture (in the western world) from requiring 50% or more of the population to be producers to less than 3% to produce the food needed for the whole population.

So I think you should think about this:

Having time to do all the things we enjoy, and not work 7 days a week, 12+ hours a day to survive, thank technology.
If you are healthy and you are growing old or our parents are, thank technology.
If you are sitting in a nice comfy chair reading a great book, with a fire place burning, thank technology.
If you have time to read my rambling blog, thank technology

I think the solution to our “problems with technology” or rather our lifestyle of today, is more technology, and with that I mean technology that makes using all this technology easier and more efficient.

And as an entrepreneur, I encourage anyone seeing the problems, to flip the coin to see the opportunity, be an entrepreneur and create something that makes our use of technology more efficient and improve our quality of life!

Share your thoughts!

And please share how you organize your life/lifestyle to make efficient use of technology to improve quality of life, do you have method to not become stressed by an always on World? How do you manage that constant flow of e-mails? Or other things to react to?

Maybe there is hope for Spotify

Nicolai Wadstrom — Wed, 04 May 2011 08:13:32 +0000

Maybe there is hope for Spotify after all, after reading this: iPod, Meet Spotify; iTunes, Say Hello To Your Future Rival. First I have to say that I absolutley love Spotify’s product. It’s a great team, and I am furtunate to be connected with some of the early team that created spotify, so I have been using it since the very early and closed test versions. Until about 2 years ago, when I came to the US to build up BootstrapLabs, because Spotify is not in the US and does not work in the US.

And over time I have slowly started to think that, their fate might be the same as so many great European startups, they are surpassed by US (mostly Silicon Valley) startups that start later, but execute quicker. The European ones tend to end up in the dead pool, or be acquired by the US competitor. It’s dangerous to be too late in entering the US market for European startups.

For a company like Spotify, this is especially true, when over 50% of the world’s music market (in $) happen to be in the US, and Spotify has yet to come to the US. I am not alone in this thinking, when I talk to founders of some of the big Silicon Valley music startups.

I hope I am wrong, and that Spotify, will soon enter the US market, and take a stronghold position!

What are your thoughts?

BootstrapLabs now also in San Francisco!

Nicolai Wadstrom — Wed, 04 May 2011 01:01:14 +0000

Starting in May, BootstrapLabs now also has an office location in SOMA in San Francisco. CEO/Founder of BootstrapLabs, Nicolai Wadstrom will be working from this office from now on. At this location we also have space to host our European founders when they are in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Redwood City through our Partnership with White & Lee (and Whiteboard Accelerator), will continue to be a great location for our companies, to host their staff and operations. With the addition of the San Francisco location, we are also close to all of the startup activity in the San Francisco SOMA area, and a great location for events and networking.

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URBANiGO in Alpha – a New Social Discovery startup

Nicolai Wadstrom — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 17:10:20 +0000

BootstrapLabs company Urban Metrics is still in stealth now starting to roll out a closed Alpha test of it’s first product URBANiGO, a Social Discovery service for consumers.

To get an invite for the service, once it opens for a Beta testing, goto the URBANiGO website:

http://urbanigo.com/

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Commandster.Com – FunRock Media’s new game

Nicolai Wadstrom — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 19:45:49 +0000

FunRock Media’s is new game Commandster is now in Alpha, you can try the new game here.

http://www.commandster.com/

FunRock Media is an independent gaming company with a true passion for browser based games. FunRock Media have adopted the “freemium” business model, and all games are free to play.

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Nordic Incubator Night with BootstrapLabs Founder on April 13th

Nicolai Wadstrom — Sat, 09 Apr 2011 16:43:58 +0000

Please join BootstrapLabs founder, Nicolai Wadstrom, on April 13, 2011, from 5:30pm to 8:00pm for a Silicon Vikings evening focusing on the needs of Nordic companies in transitioning to Silicon Valley, and the services, training and preparation which ought to be offered by incubators in the Nordic region to prepare start-ups for the journey.

University based business incubators are needed to facilitate commercialization for university developed technology as well as to give entrepreneurs hands-on practical training. What practical training do they need? What is the feed back loop? What regular program of “show and tell” sessions will ensure that entrepreneurs get feedback early and often.

While an incubator cannot duplicate or replace an entire ecosystem, learning to interact with the other players in the entrepreneurial startup ecosystem is a key driver — how is this to be done? Where and when does the tech transfer office get involved? How do the incubators prepare the startup for the challenges and opportunities of Silicon Valley?

Silicon Vikings has gathered a panel (including BootstrapLabs founder, Nicolai Wadstrom) to debate these topics and offer observations and suggestions. The audience will include the heads of Innovationsbron, SIVA, Aalto Venture Garage and many other University affiliated incubators from the Nordic Region in the Valley to attend the National Business Incubator Association Conference in San Jose April 10-13.

More details at Silicon Vikings Website.

Please RSVP here.

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Asia is zooming!

Nicolai Wadstrom — Sat, 19 Mar 2011 22:01:41 +0000

Fresh from the Prezi blog:

Having lived in Asia myself, it’s really nice to see that Prezi has started to grow in Korea and Japan. I felt really impressed with the energy and all the creative use of Prezi.

Prezi for Dummies – the Korean translation of last year’s original US release – was brought to life with the help of Jihoon Roh (upper left). He’s the guy that helped us to get our first Korean font set. Prezi lecturer Do-won Lee (upper right) wrote another book for the Korean market which introduces Prezi’s best practices and a manual. Dowon also created a nice prezi introducing his book. Check out Daum, Facebook or Naver to join the Korean buzz, these community sites for more info.

We also had a great Prezi Night Tokyo party where the first Japanese Prezi book was introduced.
The tickets for the party sold out in a few hours! You can keep up with Japanese community on both facebook and twitter.

Arctic Startup: Zerply Wants To Be The Next Generation Professional Network

Nicolai Wadstrom — Sat, 19 Mar 2011 19:57:02 +0000

ArcticStartup writes about Zerply:

Zerply is California based startup, that has its roots in Sweden and Estonia, through its co-founders. Zerply aims to be the best way to present yourself in a professional way. What they currently have available to the public, is bunch of very stylish profile pages which integrate relatively seamlessly to other online services. However, there’s a lot more in store according to Christofer Karltorp.

Social professional networking company Zerply joins BootstrapLabs

Nicolai Wadstrom — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 20:01:12 +0000

Today it’s official that the exciting professional social networking startup Zerply is part of the BootstrapLabs accelerator companies. We have been advising and working with Zerply for a few months, and we are really exciting about what Zerply is doing.

Zerply is catering for the fact that the established leader in the professional networking space, is a fairly “corporate” service, that really just made papers resumes into digital versions. Today communication and networking on the web is social, and moves in real-time and not static.

In short Zerply is redefining how professional social networking is being done, LinkedIn took paper resumes online, and Zerply is making them social.

The company is based in Silicon Valley, and was founded by Christofer Karltorp and Taaniel Jakobs.

And yes, of course I am also on Zerply!

More about Zerply here.

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Nokia – Rest in Peace

Nicolai Wadstrom — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 19:22:52 +0000

So it’s a done deal, Nokia and Microsoft joining forces.

I think this is bad news for Nokia, and bad news for the Nordics that was once an epicenter for Mobile technology.

Why? In spite that I think Scoble is most likley right that Windows Phone 7 has an something in terms of appeal, but:

Microsoft need a lot of hardware backing, HTC and some of the loyal Windows phone makers, have pushed Windows phones. And they will continue to do so. Most of them are more excited about Android though, for lot’s of reasons (they can extend, adopt etc). Carriers like Android (not for all the good reasons, but they can change the OS to create consumer lock-in). Nokia for Microsoft is a great choice, a full commitment for a full range of hardware devices, will help Microsoft move forward with Windows Phone 7.
But Nokia is missing out on the whole app opportunity. That is where the game is being decided right now, and Windows Phone 7, sorry there are no apps to speak of. And anyone of the developers I talk to every week here in Silicon Valley, Windows Phone 7, is platform no 5 or 6 on their list (Apple iOS and Android be the top two).
Nokia would have needed to create something that has great appeal for app developers, Android would have been the logical choice, lot’s of developers and momentum. Nokia could still done what every other mobile phone manufacturer do with Android, build custom UI and other components and apps on top to make it unique enough.
I don’t think Microsoft still has made any money out of their mobile OS franchise, they certainly have the cash to keep going for quite some time, but they can not pay developers forever to develop for the platform. And I don’t hink Nokia have the time to wait for the critical mass to emerge around Windows Phone app development.

Microsoft is desperate in the mobile space and need somebody to push hardware with it, problem is Nokia is just as desperate… Two bad does not mean synergy…

However with the resources Microsoft and Nokia have for this, something will happen, and Nokia still creates great hardware, so I think we will see some interesting phones coming out of this. But IMHO the long-term (regained) success for Nokia will not be on a clear path by this move.

What if an Average Joe got cash upfront for part in life earnings

Nicolai Wadstrom — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 23:26:40 +0000

This question popped up on Quora:

If a person offered an average Joe money upfront in exchange for a percentage of his future earnings, would that be a deal worth taking?

Really interesting thought!

I am going to take another twist and look at my self. I am thinking why would I give up let’s say 5-6% of my income. I intend to make some serious money in the course of my life!

If I look back at my 15 years as a serial entrepreneur and the millions of dollars that VC and investors put into my different ventures, I think most of those investors would have made more money if they invested in me in this model instead of in my companies. We would have aligned our interests more, and distributed risk over many companies…

Why? Well, I may not be the average Joe (which reinforces other comments here), but if I would have money to put to use where I think I can make the most money that is how I as an serial/parallell entrepreneur would act (in fact even if I would give up 5-6%, I am from Sweden and have occasionally paid 80% tax in the past…).

Money invested in a company is always bound to the initial idea or thought that you where pursuing at that time, and sometimes reality catch up, but as many other VC funded entrepreneurs know, when the investors and VC’s are onboard you are not that agile anymore. Do keep in mind, many of my companies were started in Europe before I came to the Bay area (different type of investors).

Furthermore, today I fund initial steps of many of my new ventures, because I like the control I get doing that. A PIC would get leverage of all of those projects that I can create. And perhaps give more fuel to make them successful…

So my conclusion is I would personally give up a few % of life earnings for a one-time lump sum (if big enough, and with a fair buy-out clause, as in the links Kim posted), but only if I believed it would help me be more successful quicker.

Now wonder how the IRS would treat such a transaction?

BootstrapLabs founder speaks at Stanford today

Nicolai Wadstrom — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 08:01:23 +0000

Stanford Engineering’s European Entrepreneurship and Innovation Thought Leaders (ME421) is a weekly speaker series that presents industry leaders from Europe’s hitech startup, venture finance, corporate and university research and technology commercialization communities to share their insights and experiences with aspiring and veteran entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley.

From Ireland to Russia, and from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean, Europe’s technology sector is today playing a growing role in bringing new energy, environmental, water, information, medical device and life sciences technologies to market thru small- and medium-sized enterprises. Europe’s countries and regions, however, face substantial challenges in rapidly moving to the marketplace the technical innovations that are being developed in universities, national laboratories and corporations. Many of these regions are increasingly looking to Silicon Valley to accelerate this process and train a new generation of entrepreneurs and innovation professionals. We invite you to join us each week for a lively discussion of the challenges and opportunities facing European entrepreneurs, investors and innovation sector organizations.

Part of the first session Monday the 3rd of January, BootstrapLabs founder and CEO Nicolai Wadstrom will speak and be part of the panel.

More information here.

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Groupon Raising Up to $950 Million in Funding

Nicolai Wadstrom — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 09:01:33 +0000

Groupon has filed for a Series G funding round that authorizes it to raise up to $950 million on December 17. The new round of funding comes just weeks Groupon rejected a $6B offer from Google.

According to VC Expert, Groupon filed for a certificate to authorize the Series G round last week. If the report is accurate, Groupon’s post-money valuation would be somewhere between $6.4 billion to $7.8 billion. It’s not clear who is participating in the round, nor is it clear how far along Groupon is in the fundraising process. However, today’s news lays the groundwork for what could be one of the biggest venture capital rounds in history.

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BREAKING: Groupon Raising Up to $950 Million in Funding

Nicolai Wadstrom — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 01:01:22 +0000

Groupon has filed for a Series G funding round that authorizes it to raise up to $950 million on December 17. The new round of funding comes just weeks Groupon rejected a $6B offer from Google.

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How Social Web Games are more like TV-series than “Core Game Movies”

Nicolai Wadstrom — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 22:09:18 +0000

Social web based games have emerged as a very popular entertainment segment with companies like Zynga, Playdom, and smaller startups such as our very own FunRock Media. Many believe that these new types of games is part of a new larger gaming market than the traditional “Core Gaming” market (with First Person shooter hit’s such as Halo, some say that core gaming will be 20% of the gaming market and the new and emerging social (and casual) games market will be 80% of the total gaming market (and increase the total gaming market five fold).

So why are these games so different? And why have the traditional gaming companies had such a hard time to get into this new gaming market, and allowing Zynga and others to become billion dollar companies?

I think because the whole model of creating games has shifted completely with these web based social games, the traditional core games are published, they are built with a large team, with creative, programmers and graphic designers. Typical budgets are in line with or above a movie budget.

Looking at the Movie industry, I think we can find a great parallell, the core games are created like a Movie, just as the big Movie team shoots everything, works a for a long time to get the best clips, and do a final cut, with great music, great sound, everything is to be perfect, because when you release the film you can change it…

Same goes with core gaming, once you published the game you can’t really change it, so you better make sure it’s bug free and a great game, or you won’t make your money back.

Compare the Movie making business to the modern TV-show making business, look at a show like friends (just at the top of my mind), when they made this, they had a big team of writers that wrote each episode just the week before it was shoot, and aired days after. They managed to keep building and growing the same concept for about 10 years, buy continually making the story relevant and interesting (with viewer feedback, current events, seasons etc).

Web based social games are much more like a TV-show than a Movie. It does not cost much money to get started and publish your first game, and get players. You start small and grow in iterations, sometimes those iterations happen every day, making the game evolve and your players see new things growing their gaming experience weekly or daily.

Then add the technology and network effect. The web based social games, done right, scale through viral interaction of your players to grow quickly, and you build technical feedback into the games to measure what people like, and interact with and what not.

The web based social games though require a staff of game designers and programmers (just like the TV-serie’s writers etc), that continually improve and grow the game. This adds cost, but yet they cost less then that “big hit” model of core games, as you are continually improving and interacting with your players, but you know you are spending resources on things that players enjoy, by actually measuring and feeding back.

Another way to put it, web based social games is the Google of games, and the Electronic Arts and old publishers are the old media companies…

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Merry X-Mas and Happy New year!

Nicolai Wadstrom — Fri, 24 Dec 2010 22:57:33 +0000

We had a great new 2010, that saw the recovery from the financial crisis, and an exciting fall in the startup space, especially here in the Bay area where we are seeing a large amount of interesting companies being launched, and a large mount of investments being made to accelerate those. We have seen great momentum with the companies we work with such as Urban Metrics, Witsbits and Prezi this year.

Here at BootstrapLabs we think 2011 will be more exciting than ever, some say bubble, but with a large number of early stage startups to companies like Facebook and Groupon profitable and growing quickly and established companies with 100′s of billion dollars in cash reserves (to use for M&A), in 2011 we will see some of the most exciting IPO’s and acquisitions in a long time, which will fuel furthers investments and inspire many new startups to be created.

Here’s our Christmas card (of course created in Prezi):

http://bootstraplabs.com/events/x-mas-2010/

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

NIcolai Wadstrom
BootstrapLabs CEO/Founder

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