Mikael Palmstedt

After living in Germany back and forth for about three years I have long ago realized that the Germans like on thing very very much, striking! Now the time has apparently come to one of PeoplePaths sites Haustierstall (german):

Long story short some members are protesting against the “establishment” on Hausteristall, that is the moderators and the site admin (wow I didn’t know such a “powerstructure” existed on the site hehe). I don’t know if there’s any truth about it however I find it completely funny that members who are pissed throw up a youtube video as a protest. Which I eventually then found. The member also made another interesting vid

I love this kind of stuff

…

People are trying to convince me that they are working hard on the followup to istheshit ie istheshit version 2 and that we might soon be throwing out a beta version for closed testing.

Istheshit version 2 is a bit like the proposed followup to duke nukem 3d … planned launch for its2 was I think 18-20 months ago (duke nukem is I think 10 years delayed) … anyway now its apparently soon here and we are all extremely excited to see how it will turn out :).

Sammy and Linus hard @work on a café in Norrköping, Sweden

Konrad throws a tip about Diary of a failed startup

Since we at Bytelove are serious biz ppl we of course need to have a formal and well planned board meeting once in a while … so the 6th of June in the supersmall city of Lidköping at the edge of the lake Vänern in Sweden we decided to sit down and have som “very” serious conversations …. afterall we are in a very serious business.

From the left: Linus, Peter, Anders, and me

Its quite easy to guess who is the GFX guy, the villain, the programmer and the marketer (altough we all go into all four categories a bit, just some more than the others).

The conclusion from the first round was; sell more stuff.

Anders; officially the chairman and the oldest most respected of our team …

Next we almost went to a decent place by the river Lidan and realized that there was only two bars open in the entire city of which we occupied one (which did only carry two sorts of beer). We did not conclude much during this second round except that Bytelove is probably gonna be one of the 1-3 biggest companies in the world within 3-4 years due to the geekification of the general public.

*NOTE* The crappiness of the pictures above is courtesy of an iphone camera*/NOTE*

I mentioned Xcerion in an earlier post. Here’s a quick look on their newly named icloud application and a brief introduction to the company.

*Courtesy of Xcerion AB

Xcerion was founded as early as 2001 with the aim to create a world class operating system that can be run from your browser. Their slogan is that “software should be free”. Xcerion lists a few milestones of the company as seen below:

• 2008 Xcerion rebrands to icloud and wins Red Herring 100 Europe Award
• 2007 Northzone Ventures invests 10 MUSD
• 2006 Investment from US investors
• 2004 US Operations launched with office in Seattle
• 2003 Proof-of-concept prototype created out of R&D
• 2002 “Stealth Mode”, R&D evolving previous research
• 2001 Xcerion emerged with clear focus on Information
• 1998 Daniel Arthursson and his tech team developed the worlds first XML Server

As a sidenote Xcerion is located among others in Linköping Sweden, a very interesting region for people looking to hire world class application developers.

Logging into the application my first impression is really, wow is this really possible to do with a browser. The GUI is really slick and navigation between the applications really feels much more like a “standard” desktop than anything else. This is of course nothing that makes icloud stand out in itself but its a nice touch.

The main points argued on the Xcerion homepage about the icloud is how its very easy to create new applications for the icloud and from the start they seem to first focus on the developing community … currently offering a developer competition. I unfortunately don’t have the time to look into the system but info is of course available on their homepage.

Looking at the icloud application I see many uses but maybe most of all I think its useful for very inexpensive terminals that does not have much more than browser capabilities. Using the icloud for these kind of applications could be a very inexpensive way to build eg wifi terminals in logistical processes (mount on trucks, workstations, etc), build into stereos etc.

Xcerion with its icloud feels like one of those make or break kind of companies, 99% chance of failure 1% chance of becoming a global leader in its field.

It will be very interesting to see how Xcerion intends to market and distribute their system when its ready for a real launch, I’m guessing its still quite some time though since they currently only support IE browsers. 

I hope they do well.

Finally Bytelove is up for real, feuturing clothes and accessories for WoW fans, Gamers and Geeks. We are also the official reseller for the Kopimi shirts from thepiratebay.org

Funniest thing about the site at the moment is our new bamboo t-shirts, yeap the premium t-shirts are made of bamboo cellulose. Being able to make a shirt out of bamboo was actually enough to make me purchase them, seriously much more fun to market. The fact that they have a good iso marking for being both environmentally friendly and produced under humane conditions doesn’t make it worse.

Currently the shop is working fine and I think we have a nice design, in terms of functions there’s much to be done:

• Complete redo of the checkout
• Implementing DE, FR and NO version
• Local payment options e.g. lastscrift (DE) and fakturabetalning (SE)
• Language specific URLs (though )

Plus lots of more things.

Christian Rudolf at Disruptive launched his new project mjukvara, the aim is to become somewhat of a swedish equivalent to download.com. As I understand it they are gonna rely on a lot of editorial material regarding the quality and reliability of different antivirus and spyware softwares among others.

Mjukvara is sort of a seo pot, I’m not sure its easy to catch returning visitors for this kind of site however the quality traffic coming from google should be enough to make some money … guessing some eCPM rates of around EUR5-10 for the google traffic :).

Ordered some stuff from Bangkok, a UPS guy knocked on our door about 48 hours later. Hooray for globalization.

Soon …..

The shop as such is not opened yet, this first version kind of suck as well so … after 4-5 iterations it will be perfect

In September 2007 a new initiative called Mindpark was initiated by a group of Swedish newspapers. The aim being to create sort of a thinktank and a mediacompany able to act on its own as well as supporting its owners in understanding, implementing and administer projects which will take their old media companies into the new media world. As far as I remember Mindpark got SEK 40 000 000 initial funding (a bit more than EUR4 000 000, by Swedish measurements a lot of money).

The initiative was praised both by the established media companies, the grassrot internet entrepeneurs and the Swedish blogosphere. I thought it was a great step by the newspapers, thinking of the Holtzbrinck e-lab who has been quite successful here in Germany.

Mindpark opened its doors by having one of the most frequently updated blogs in Sweden with regard to writing about new media and how the internet is reshaping people’s daily habits etc, great posts almost every day. One aim of Mindpark was to be a thinktank which they have accomplished I guess. With that said they now must have spent at least SEK1 500 000 of their money, that’s quite an expensive thinktank.

Another aim of Mindpark (which I hope is the main one) was to deliver nine “projects” per year, the scope of these projects I don’t know. It is now the end of March and as far as I know there’s just one project being officially released called Rubbet. Rubbet is quite a weak software platform that should not take a decent developer any amount of time to produce with a very poorly implemented GUI (hey tags are cool right?!?). A new version is apparently in the build-up though.

Mindpark is a very loud voice in the Swedish blogosphere, but their main mission is not to be a great blog and opinionmaker. Leading and managing a great development company is not about going to every conference there is but about actually getting sh#t done, the results will catch up with you eventually.

I hope there’s something great bubbling underneath Mindpark that they are not telling us (even though they say they are aiming to be 100% transparent), but until actual results are shown I’m sad to say that Mindpark seems to become just another one of those projects initiated by larger companies where money go in and nothing comes out except talk.

I’d suggest Mindpark start doing as the e-lab, less talking more doing … and start to deliver amazing concepts. Until that happens I hope they get a nice amount of bashing on the net.