One panel – three SIME friends

This is a panel discussion from the Google Zeitgeist event last year. Three friends of SIME – Loic Le Meur, Martin Varsavsky and Marc Samwer – talk about entrepreneurship and their companies. They also manage to tell a few good war stories from their life in the startup world.

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Old media gets the new world

The afternoon at Medieteknik Branschdag brought some thoughts from people working with traditional media companies who want to reinvent themselves for a networked world.

Sara Öhrvall took the audience through 24 hours of media consumption. As more and more people live in urban areas, habits and dreams change and concepts like the morning newspaper or morning tv have to change and adapt. Bonnier has launched an idea lab called B.Vision to spur and channel innovation around new media.

Joakim Jardenberg from Mindpark talked about how transparency can be used to test ideas, drive conversations and attract the best minds out there. By giving data and insights to the community instead of keeping them secret you get invaluable feedback and another type of business advantage than you could get by holding on to your information.

Both Mindpark and Bonnier are trying to think about how their traditional media companies can evolve and survive in a changing media landscape. But from all the talks today about these changes it’s apparent that radical change is the exception. Passionate individuals seem to drive the discussion about change in somewhat hostile environments used to old production models and economic logic. Just from the topics these speakers touch upon, we can deduce that themes like the semantic web and the power of transparency, blogging and software are far from mainstream knowledge in the media world. This means that there are a multitude of opportunities for both knowledge creation and business in the shifting borderland between old media and new.

Transformed business in the mediascape

A common theme on the Medieteknik Branschdag event is the changing nature of the mediascape. Björn Jeffrey from Good Old talks about a technical divide between those who understand the disruptive force of software and those who don’t, and suggestst that any business touched by Internet technologies should also view themselves as being in the technology business. Swedish Minister for Justice Beatrice Ask talks about how the juridical system can cope with how people consume media today, about how business and law can keep up with the fast paced movement towards free. Pontus Schultz talks about how media needs to realise that their old business models based on distribution monopolies will not work in the new economy.

You can follow the event live by a Bambuser stream from Björn Falkevik of Stockholm Social Media Club:

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SIME blog covers Medieteknik Branschdag in Stockholm

Students of the Media Technology programme at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm will host a one-day conference for students and alumni about the media business this wednesday, the 9th of April. Speakers include Björn Jeffrey from Good Old, Sara Öhrvall from Bonnier, Joakim Jardenberg from Mindpark and Swedish Minister for Justice Beatrice Ask. The event also features an exhibition where companies, unions, magazines and incubators present themselves. The exhibition features exciting student projects as well. See the full programme at the event website.

The SIME blog will post updates from the conference, collecting and summarizing the highlights and buzz of the event.

Mahesh and his team organizes Facebook Developers Garage

This Friday March 14 it is time for Stockholm’s first Facebook Garage Event, organized by Mahesh Kumar and his team at KTH NuStart. (Mahesh also works with SIME and Result). The Friday night event is a meetup on Facebook and OpenSocial application development. Speakers include:
David Haddad (Spontu) – speaking on Mobile Space
Tomas Nihlen (Innovationsbloggen.se,, Urban-Lifestyle) – speaking on Social Networks
Brit Stakston (JMW Kommunikation) – speaking on the other reality: how companies often fear social media instead of focusing on the possibilities.
Jonas Lindberg Nyvang (MySpace.com) speaking on Open Social
Martin Andersson (Pronto Communications) – speaking on developing apps on FB. They created the pink ribbon campaign in Sweden.

Moderator: Beata Wickbom, SecondBusiness

Time: 4 30pm to 8pm @ Nya Matsalen/Nymble, KTH.

Read more on the event wiki and join the Facebook Group.

SIME innovation Day – Nominate your favorite entrepreneurs!

We’re kick-starting the New Year with SIME Innovation Day, and as we promised on the SIME07 Conference you have the opportunity to nominate one company to the event.

More about SIME Innovation Day:
SIME Innovation Day is a by invitation only, free event for distinguished entrepreneurs. The objective is to create a meeting place for entrepreneurial companies and to open the doors to partnerships, investments and co-operations with our Co-Hosts (Ericsson, Google, Telenor). The entrepreneurs will be able to present their cases to relevant executives from Google, Telenor and Ericsson at the venue. Either in pre-arranged speed meetings, or live on stage.
The following criteria need to be met for all companies invited to participate:

* High level of innovation
* Clear end user focus
* Large market potential
* International growth potential
* Skilled management
* We prefer companies/products that are already established to those that soon will be
* We prefer companies that either want to become convergent or already have convergent solutions

If you are such a company or if there is a company you know that meet the criteria, send an email to innovationday@sime.nu and we’ll invite the company suggested, provided that there still is a spot open.
WHERE? Polstjärnan, Sveavägen 77, Stockholm, Sweden
WHEN?February 7th, 09.00-17.00 CET
QUESTIONS? Don’t hesitate to email us at innovationday@sime.nu if you have any questions about the event!