Speakers I listened to Day no. 1 at FOWA:

Robert Kalin, the founder of Etsy.com. His presentation was sadly a near-catastrophe - unfortunately. He’s a very charming and witty guy and he has some abstract and very interesting ideas - but in today’s presentation he didn’t really pull ‘em off. I’m pretty sure he could do so if he hadn’t been as unlucky (lot’s of technical problems) and perhaps he could have prepared a little better? Skipping the chewing gum while presenting would have helped - but what the hell … Robert and Etsy.com has some amazing ideas on UI and IA e.g. browse by color.

Greate quote though: “Innovation can capture market share”. That’s great. It’s true. And I simply love it.

——

Daniel Waterhouse of big VC firm 3i. Not much new under the sun. Basic stuff about the process of luring Venture Capitalists in the net. I’ve been there and I’ve done that (twice), so it wasn’t that interesting for me I guess - besides from some case studies telling the story of insanely huge investment in the $300m range.

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Ted Rheingold of Dogster. Impossible for me to relate to this product: a kitsch-like dog lovers community. I did like Ted though - he did a great job. Here’s a few quotes that pretty much sums up his style and core message:

“Fuck-up fast” = making mistakes is OK - but undo them fast.
“Make you business a business” = know exactly how to make $$$.
“I used the wisdom of my-crowds” = learn from family and friends.

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John Resig of the Mozilla Corporation. Since I’m not a developer I didn’t understand half of what he was talking about. But it’s always enjoyable to listen to a well-prepared, truly passionate, and very intelligent young guy presenting. Not surprisingly he’s working for the Mozilla Corp. Guess, Martin, our genius Front-End Developer at TraceWorks would have enjoyed this guy.

——

Kevin Rose, founder and chief architect at Digg / Pownce / Revision3. Sympathetic and relaxed guy who’s doing what he does best; knitting together some fun, simple and useful web applications - often with some sort of inherited social twist. One can only respect him. His presentation though was unfortunately not all that interesting: going through some rather basic things: Hire a DBA to ensure scalability, features that work for us, watch you burn rate, and stuff like that. The best part was the anecdotes from the actual start-up days.

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I just had the pleasure of a 3 hour long chat with Martin von Haller Groenbaek who’s a partner at Copenhagen-based Bender von Haller Dragsted - a leading Scandinavian IT-law boutique. Martin specializes in legal issues related to emerging technology and business models based on openness. Need advice on e.g. issues like Creative Commons? Give the man a call.

It certainly was a great chance for me to dig a little deeper into the whole aspect of open business models as well as open source technology - something that seems to play an increasingly important role in many of my companies and in some of the projects currently in the pipeline.

Why is openness important to an ordinary small tech start-up? What exactly does “openness” mean?

I still don’t have all the answers clearly defined and I guess that’s partly why I’m talking to Martin, reading Chesbrough’s Open Business Models, booked a meeting up with the successful Danish open source entrepreneur Niels Hartvig, following SaaS vendor sugarCRM so closely, asking silly questions on Linkedin, flicking through the pages of Wikinomics, and going to listen to Jimmy Wales in Chicago a few weeks from now.

Hopefully it all helps me understand the concept of openness a lot better… Because right now I’m a little lost.

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should I listen to!? The list of speakers is rather long.

Since I’m deeply involved in marketing technology I should probably go check-out:

• Brian McAndrews, President and CEO, aQuantive, Inc.
• James Bilefield, CEO, Openads

And since TraceWorks is depending heavily on M$ I’m of course considering:

• Steve Ballmer, CEO, Microsoft

Web 3.0 is something I don’t understand at all so I should probably listen carefully to:

• Nova Spivack, Founder and CEO, Radar Networks (his blog)

I’m pretty involved with idea lab “Frank & Able” (stealth) why I think I could learn a lot from super star inventor (latest Metaweb):

• Danny Hillis, Co-Chairman and Chief Technology Officer, Applied Minds, Inc.

Who else should I learn from? What else should I do?

BTW: Anybody else going to “Web Summit 2.0″? Let’s meet-up, have a beer, and change the world.

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This is a collection of some of the best strips. If you only buy 3.000 books this year, this should be one of them. It’s a funny book.

Facts:
170 comic strips in english – All in colour and all!
PLUS a very special announcement from Mr. James Joyce.

Buy it here

NB! This book is ready to ship Thursday the 27th of September, 2007.

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I went there last week, I think it was. 5×5 km relay race with TraceWorks competing with our new big investor, Nordic Venture Partners and many of their portfolio companies e.g. Zyb, Polar Rose, Giritech and many more. It was fun.

My time was about 23 minutes. Well, some way I was a little faster - but who cares!?

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Check it out here at Spot-A-Job.

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Normally I prefer more entrepreneurial style / web 2.0′ish conferences like Carson’s FOWA which I’m attending in October - usually they’re a little more fun than the often pretty mind numbing industry specific conferences I’ve attended a 1000 times - such as SES and Ad:tech.

But since my soul and my life is deeply interconnected to TraceWorks - you know the company behind Headlight, a web application for marketing professionals - I think it will be a fairly good move to check out what the hot shots in the marketing industry has to say. That’s why I’m going to DMA07 to listen to what the biiig Agencies have to say. And since we’re 3 people going from TraceWorks it will certainly be a lot of fun.

Anybody been there? What should I expect?

A very positive surprise is that one of the keynote speakers is the Founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales. I’m very interested in learning what’s on his mind and especially look forward to learn about his “Google-killer” search engine “Wikia Search” … I among many certainly hope that Wales succeeds in creating a true alternative to Google, because as he explains himself:

“This is fundamental, basic information about the world. It needs to be neutral, and there needs to be an accountable, transparent, public dialogue about how it’s created.”

Read the full article on FastCompany

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A lot of people ask me what the hell LinkedIn is actually good for. For you out there who’s not familiar with LinkedIn it’s an online network of more than 13 million experienced professionals from around the world, representing 150 industries.

Well, I could probably come up with a few more useful things but it’s primary function to me is that it really helps me locate and eventually hire some amazingly talented colleagues.

The procedure is straight forward.

1. Click the “People” tab
2. Type in your search criteria e.g. “C# .NET SQL2005″ and select the appropriate “Industry” & “Location”
3. Locate the right people among the search results and choose “Send InMail”

4. Select “Career opportunity” and write a letter of introduction:

This is how I’ve recruited half of my last 10 colleagues: Very talented people who were not actively looking for a job change. So I guess it works. This is my statistics the last year or so:

Note! Remember only to contact people through LinkedIn who’s “interested in career opportunities” - a user profile setting which per default is set to “interested …”. If you begin to use LinkedIn a lot for this specific purpose then you’ll probably need to upgrade to a PRO account - which includes 200 “InMails per month”.

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Ryan Carson (founder of Carsyn Systems ltd) offers a practical and down-to-earth description of what it takes to build a web app - especially the financial aspects if you decide to bootstrap the whole process from idea to finished product.

It can work! It did for me! In many ways Ryan’s description is similar to how I work with new projects today. It is also very close to how I started TraceWorks with my co-founder Anders and the marvelous design/tech cousins Jesper and Jimmi.

Ryan’s blog post dates back to 2006 - but everything is still true (… much of the stuff he’s talking about is actually becoming easier / cheaper by the day: hosting, communication, and in some ways also marketing).

Read it here: The Cost of Bootstrapping Your App: Part One & Part Two

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