Archive for the ‘startup trivia’ Category

Fat Statement Round II

Wednesday, February 17th, 2010

Fat Statement is primarily known for being the nr1 custom button badge company in Sweden who later also started producing dog tags that the customer could design themselves as well as for the webserie Knappnytt.

fatstatement 

From the left; Knatten, Buttons, Dog tags

Fat Statement have yearly b2c sales of a bit over EUR100 000 and want to grow its international sales and especially being able to develop its software for external customers such as small to medium sized printers. Hence just before christmas FS issued new stocks and put in new shareholders; Bytelove, Dan, Nicolai (Bootstraplabs), and PeoplePath. I personally believe very much in the company and increased my share and some of the old shareholders also joined in.

I’m quite happy about the new setting since it feels like a fresh start with people involved that I like to work with. FS and Bytelove will start cooperating with the custom dog tag and button badges production so in the near future we will also send from Germany which will lower international shipping costs significantly. I will take a fairly active part in the administration of the company as well so FS will probably feel a bit closer to me.

Hopefully in 18 months we will have the coolest web2print system for printers out there and the world is busy wearing our stuff :D .

Bootstraplabs, for European companies wanting a foot in Silicon Valley

Wednesday, July 15th, 2009

Bootstraplabs run by Nicolai opened its doors a few months ago. Bootstraplabs offers companies a cost effective way to establish themselves in the valley and to accelarate their business.

Currently some companies using the service are:

Prezi: Trying to innovate slidepresentations, you have to see this :) .

Witsbits: Cloud computing platform

It will be very interesting to see the development over the coming months.

Stuff happening during the summer

Wednesday, July 15th, 2009

Summertime, especially July, means that things start going a bit slowly in the online and e-commerce world. Some fun stuff happening/found lately though:

Betreut: Steffen continues to kill in the baby sitting area, now extending to all kinds of services such as dog sitting (tierbetreuung). More lame Swedish version would be Grannar (supported by lots of old media but still doesn’t manage to push through).

DTG: Swedish Direct to Garment king Peter got into a pretty nasty accident a few months ago, when you run a business this is the kind of thing you are always scared to death about, hope it didn’t hurt Peters business to much and I’m sure we’re gonna see more DTG shirts around the stores in Sweden soon :) .

Inredning: Dan, aka throwing up 2 sites a day maniac, just realesed his new shop Inredning. Needs more new unique products but I’m sure its gonna find its focus in the coming months grossing millions a month in a year ;) .

OnlinePizza: There’s been a lot of talk about Pizza lately, looking at the German Pizza.de these guys are on to something good. What I love about the Swedish service is that you also pay online!

Rumplo: Just an absolutely great T-Shirt shopping portal, be sure to check out one of its sponsors, LaFraise.

Zappos: Nothing new I’m just wondering why ppl start talking about it so much right now, Zappos been around for looooong, maybe the CEOs appreance in US show The Apprentice could have something todo with it.

Also have a look at ArcticStartup, now with Paula as a writer the Swedish focus has exploded the last two months. Especially read this post about Spotify (also commented by Carl Bildt Swedish Minister for Foreign Affairs) and Soundcloud :) .

Bytelove T-shirt design competition ended

Sunday, July 12th, 2009

The Bytelove t-shirt design competition has ended at 99designs, the winner is shown below and you can click here to see all results, in total we recieved some 700 entries of which 500 is displayed on the page.

 2109007-original

Transformers inspired motive

Istheshit.net relaunch

Thursday, July 2nd, 2009

A few hours ago the new version of Istheshit.net went live, no problems so far lets hope it stays that way.

Hopefully the new site will be such an injection that we want to actively develop the project further. The original specification is from 2005 so don’t judge us to hard if some of the functions might seem a bit oldfashioned ;) .

Istheshit.net is currently a joint project between Bytelove and Samworks.

Bytelove flickr stuff

Wednesday, June 17th, 2009

Funny to see how many ppl actually do unboxing and that kind of stuff: http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=bytelove

http://www.flickr.com/photos/syncaddict/3525468897/in/photostream/ <- apparently arrived oki

Oh, we just got new securitex letters with our logo, they are just amazing … really hard to break.

PeoplePath Horse design Illustration contest 99designs

Sunday, May 31st, 2009

Currently PeoplePath is running a design contest at 99designs.

The competition was up for about 14 hours and I think we already recieved several interesting design entries. I must say that even though the final design is of course overpaid by itself its hard to beat the 99designs concept when it comes to achieving a variety of designs.

New Server Istheshit

Thursday, April 2nd, 2009

Since our beta site of istheshit needs a new home when it goes live, the Bytelove traffic is increasing and due to the fact that our current managed server solution seems to be managed by kids (who gave us like 3 days downtime the last 3 months of which 1.5 was purely due to their incompetence) we thought it time to invest in a new server at another colocation place :) .

 

peterIMG_0104

1U Rackserver 4*SAS/SATA 2*XEON 5405 8GB 667 fb dimm, 3 Ware 9650SE 4port ML RAID, 500GB 32MB SATA-II, IPMI 2.0 with virtual media over LAN & ded lab KVM over lan

Woho :) .

Johan Staël von Holstein & Jonas Birgersson intervju

Sunday, March 29th, 2009

Jag är visserligen kluven till JSvH men i nedanstående intervju kan man inte annat än lida med honom och Jonas Birgersson.

Beware; Försök aldrig bygga nåt stort, uträtta nåt som kan förändra tillvaron för många människor och säg absolut inte att det kommer bli skitbra när du gör det, ifall du som nio av tio företag misslyckas kommer du få sitta i “soffan” som en skurk och svara på nedanstående frågor. Intervjun riktigt ramar in svenska folkets framåtanda och syn på företagare och vad det innebär att “misslyckas” i Sverige.

Jag är för övrigt fascinerad över hur bra grejer JB lyckas förmedla i intervjun trots den trista inriktningen på den.

 

Knappnytt 10: Tingalin

Friday, March 27th, 2009

**DISCLAIMER**

I have nothing against Russians nor do I think suicide is a good idea.