SIME Talks 9 – Nostalgia Edition: Morten Lund "I say a lot of Bullshit. Everyone does. No one really knows anything"

Maverick, Crazy, Non-conformist, Radical, Innovative, the hippie entrepreneur, all can also go by the 2 letter word, “ML” (for Morten Lund). He is so outspoken, loud, daring, and if you have watched him speak, you can lose a million dollars betting that he is not Scandinavian. Some say he is the pride of the lost Scandinavia, the one that went down with the Vikings.

Morten on SIME in his blog

Whatever be his roots, the wiring in ML is quite simple. He does not believe in bull shit (in his own words) such as “going by the books, go by the rules, go by the mainstream”. Instead the man is a complete “screw it, just do it” kinds, and he wears that attitude every day to work, be it investing in Skype or being part of starting up dead duck companies (that made him officially bankrupt in 2008) . For him, its all about just doing it, or as he says “just fu**ing doing it”. And ML has never failed to entertain us at SIME (Stockholm 1998, 07,08, Copenhagen 07 and Barcelona 09) during his last 2 year’s of continuous “crowd-raving-audience-loving-controversial-provoking” statements of candor that scream loud on your face making you slip deep within your chairs and giving you the “Argh, I ought to get out there and do something big” feeling.

View his talk at Le Web here

ML has a ripple effect in you, in the sense that, he is so calm, cool and sexy, but is yet aggressive and delivers the knock out punch just at the right time in your head making you stand up and take notice of the message in between his “swear words smeared take home message”.

Enough personal bias, here is some formal introduction to the man if you have not heard of:

Morten’s wiki, crunch base, facebook, twitter, blog

And below his message is, err, “Everyone says a lot of bull shit. No one really knows what they are talking about; so just go out there do it”. The timing cannot be more precise, with the SIME Awards Nominees to be released soon ( in like a matter of minutes), this is the perfect message for them.

SIME 08 – Morten Lund from SIME on Vimeo.

SIME Awards Stockholm: Process, meet the jury

SIME Awards this year has taken a completely new path. From the previous year’s edition of allowing companies to nominate themselves and then doing a yes or no jury vote, this year we decided to hand pick the “deserving” companies ourselves and then do the jury process. We dare to say that we have the who’s who of tomorrow’s digital stars of Scandinavia all indexed and tagged, ready to go through a stringent jury committee to capture the top prize at the Awards Gala and Dinner on November 12 in Stockholm.

View the agenda for SIME Stockholm here

SIME Awards has 2 categories this year:

1. SIME Rising Stars of the North: The pioneers and innovators within the tech scene. Companies that have a working product / service, do not have more than 50 employees and, preferably was founded in the last 2 years. We call them the rising stars, the one’s that will be the toast of Scandinavia, giving the SIME audience a chance for a “aha” moment (more in the likes of “aha, we saw them first in SIME 09″)
2. SIME Grand Prize: The Big Industry Star are the big lions that are roaring past the competition, finding interesting niches and most importantly, constantly innovating in the Scandinavian digital landscape.

View more info on the Awards here

At the present moment, we have made a list of companies that fit into these criteria, and passed it to the jury members. Once the jury express their opinion and reach a consensus, the nominees will be announced through the blog. The chosen companies will then be given a chance to talk and connect with you, make a quick blog even on why they think they would / should win the top SIME prize.

The jury for SIME Awards 09 consists of a handpicked team of experts within the areas Internet, technology, journalism and entrepreneurship. You can find their quick SIME – twitt- profiles, their online hang out spots right here

Good luck jury, looking forward to present the nominee list soon.

SIME Stockholm: 4 Dimensions of Digital Opportunities

SIME is all about digital opportunities. And at this year’s SIME Stockholm, we present to you the 4 dimensions of digital opportunities:

1: Inspiration

Inspiration comes from every single atom of SIME. But of course the main drivers are the various speakers and thought leaders, panels and the quality of the conference itself.

Find some of the inspiration ambassadors who are going to be SIME this year here.

2. Business

Business through Networking Bazaars where we are dedicated to making you meet all the people that you are interested in meeting of the over 1 000 thought leaders, entrepreneurs, communications experts, developers, venture capitalists, marketers and of course the SIME speakers and guests from all over the world.

The Experience Manager ensures you meet the people you want to; meet the speakers corner is a natural hang out place for the speakers after their show on stage, truly in the spirit of SIME always ready to mingle and have a discussion with you; demo zone for you to play and see some funky stuff; nominees plaza, a place for you to catch the digital stars – emerging and the current biggies and finally, a welcome to Stockholm counter for you to understand and get all the local expertise for you to expand your business into Sweden.

A detailed idea of the different facets of the networking bazaar here

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The City of Stockholm joins Northern Europe’s leading Internet conference SIME

And we are proud to report that the City of Stockholm / Stockholm Business Region has joined forces with us to shine more spotlight onto the Scandinavian region to lead the ICT movement and to promote the ever evolving Scandinavian digital landscape. We could not be more thrilled as this means we are essentially carrying the official Scandinavian ICT flag (if there is one such) in the global scene, taking with us companies that are the pride of Scandinavia and bringing into Scandinavia, some of the thought leaders and coolest companies from all over the globe. This has always what SIME has taken pride about – the quality, the future of content and knowledge is quality (as Michael Oreskes said at SIME 2007) and we are happy to find more such interesting ways to promote good quality content, ideas and people. (more…)

SIME Talks 8 – Nostalgia Edition: Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia, "Human Optimism is the DNA of Change"

Change is cool, at least that’s what the Obama campaign made it look like. For it was the magic word that was uttered from that teenager, to her grandmother in the dining room, all of course with varying degrees of definition, and whatever it might have meant for different people, it was quite significantly the sole driver of inspiration during the tough moments last year.

SIME 08 was all about defining the DNA of change. Succinctly put to the crowd and the panel of thought leaders was the question, are you a change maker? And the answers were to varying degrees, from “What the bleep” to “Yes, I am, hell”. And recently we were going through the digital knowledge from the last year’s show, we found a dusty tape that had something very interesting, and on digitized (though the shaky camera movements and the background noise was quite much to completely eliminate), we found some 60 seconds of raw sheer optimism.

Chairman of SIME, Ola Ahlvarsson had a quick chat with founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, and Matt Bross, CTO of British Telecom, asking them what the DNA of change was.And to them it was about people / human optimism, about innovation at the speed of life inspired by people and not at the speed of technology.

Clearly, its about us, its about people and the optimism, and that is something that will only take different connotations. Change was one such connotation. SIME is proud to have been part of the global movement.

SIME Talks 8 – Nostalgia Edition: Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia, “Human Optimism is the DNA of Change” from SIME on Vimeo.

3 and SIME launching an Android Dev. Competition. Are you up for the challenge?

3 together with SIME is launching what is called as the Swedish Android Developer Competition 09 (SADC 09),
that invites all the developers to create fun, smart and useful applications for the Android community. The winning app developer gets an Android phone, 2 free tickets to SIME Stockholm (November 11, 12) and an opportunity to present the app during the SIME Awards Evening (November 12) to an audience of top representatives from leading companies within IT, media, Internet and Advertising, giving you a perfect launch pad for your idea.

The video below is a teaser, and the link to find more information and to register is here

[Update: Check out the comments for some interesting links to Android coverage and versatility]

SADC09 from SIME on Vimeo.

SIME Talks 7 – Nostalgia Edition: Bob DeMartino, Industry Veteran : "The network is the computer", now its real"

A Vision statement is like a compass in the working of a company, it sets the direction the company wants to move forward in. A mission statement on the other hand together with values and objectives is the steering wheel for the day to day operations in the company – classical “brandonomics”. What business school does not teach you is, it might take years, probably even decades for a vision statement to come to life, and for John Gage, he could probably be one of those few who is slowly seeing his vision take shape in his former company, SUN Microsystems. For the records, John Gage is the man who came up with the phrase “the network is the computer” back in the days and clearly, SUN has got its foot closer than ever to that statement .

Below is a SIME exclusive with former Vice-President, Web and Internet Industry at SUN (currently working with Virident Systems, the architect of the GreenCloud server platform to help support the growth of GreenCloud in Web 2.0 data centers) Bob DeMartino who in his brief 2 minute interview talks about how increasingly true is the statement “the network is the computer”, to managing innovations within SUN, and, the dire need to be strategically agile to be a global leader in todays marketplace.

Bob has been accredited for managing the enterprise business within SUN in the 90′s bringing over half a billion in revenues. He also has been pioneering the Web 2.0 movement within SUN, bringing in 280M USD in revenues by working with the likes of Yahoo, eBay, LinkedIn etc.

Below is the interview:

A related SIME talk was by Stephen Parish on “the price of success vs cost of failure and the role of cloud computing.
Watch the talk here