May 2010
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6 reasons for bootstrapping before accepting VC...
Today we at CLARA closed a 1 million dollar round of funding that will provide the working capital we need to scale up and get us ready for world dominance. Until now we have been making every penny count in bootstrap mode. I’m writing this to explain my thoughts about bootstrapping, what it has done for us and why others should do the same.
When I first heard that we should...
April 2010
2 posts
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Interdisciplinary Start-ups
I just came from an talk at the Reykjavik University. Two young students decided on their own to host a series of lectures on the importance of having a interdisciplinary background. They asked me to talk about three things:
About CLARA, our startup.
How we use software in our field.
How is it going? What have you learned?
Here are the slides from my talk:
Interdisciplinary...
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Innovit Entrepreneurship Competition
The Golden Egg, Innovit’s Entrepreneurship Competition ended the other day with the following winners:
In third place we saw Nude Magazine, A great new Icelandic online fashion magazine and in first place where ReMake Electric, saving you loads of money and making your house safer by bringing us the next generation of electric safety. Unfortunately not everybody can get the great runner-up,...
March 2010
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Ministry of Ideas Explained
I’ve been getting loads of questions about the Ministry of Ideas. It recently opened it’s portal to English speakers so I’ll try to explain it a bit in this post.
A few weeks after this small economic thing we had in Iceland one of our serial entrepreneurs, Guðjón Már, called a group of peers and asked them to meet at a local pub. We talked about all the great things that could...
Global Entrepreneurship Congress
A great friend and mentor, Andri Heiðar Kristinsson founder and CEO of Innovt, is currently in Dubai attending the Global Entrepreneurship Congress. It’s a brilliant gathering of the entrepreneur ecosystem from around the world. Topics included raising the awareness levels among a new generation of entrepreneurs in the Arab world.
I was booked for another conference in San Fransisco so I...
February 2010
2 posts
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One Young World in the University of Iceland
I have a great opportunity to talk to a great audience at the University of Iceland about our experience at One Young World. Here is the prezi!
OYW on Prezi
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The One Young World Summit
I just arrived from the One Young World Summit where young people from all over the world came together to discuss the worlds problems in search of better ways. I’m truly thankful for the chance to attend this conference, about 1000 delegates where chosen from over 15.000 who applied.
Kofi Annan, Archbishup Desmund Tutu, Boris Jonson, Oscar Morales, Bob Geldof, John Kerry, Clarence...
December 2009
1 post
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PR association lunch meeting
Andrés Jónsson invited me to talk at a lunch meeting at the Public Relations association of Iceland. Andrés is currently one of the only PR guys in Iceland that gets it - I truly hope he’ll be able to open up more Icelandic eyes to the world of social media
My talk was on how Icelandic companies where using social media and and how that has been rapidly changing over the past few months....
November 2009
2 posts
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University Ventures
The University of Iceland has, from the beginning of CLARA, always been helpful! We received one of our first grants from the Rector’s Fund and our first office space at Innovit was inside the University.
Therefore it has always been great to go back there and talk about our venture with the students.
I talked about our long and hard journey from the the classroom to the founding of our...
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Global Entrepreneurship Week
I had the privalge of working with the Kaufman foundation to help with the Global Entrepreneurship Week
For one week, millions of young people around the world join a growing movement of entrepreneurial people, to generate new ideas and to seek better ways of doing things. Countries across six continents come together to celebrate Global Entrepreneurship Week, an initiative to inspire young...
September 2009
1 post
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999 Social Media Conference
Here are my slides (or more precisly my Prezi) at the 999 Social Media Conference:
I talked about three things;
1) Some trends we have noticed in the change of the how we look at marketing. How the content creation and media is going from the mass media to us, how companies should involve their customers in a conversation instead of looking at them as an audience listening to there...
March 2009
2 posts
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What is a Brand?
The definitions of a what a brand is are endless.
I asked this question in a lecture at the University of Reykjavik
I have a feeling that a brand is the collective of what people think about a brand, how people feel about a brand and what people say about a brand. And notice, this explanation doesn’t include the marketing director or brand managers, nor what he writes in the...
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The Future of Market Research
I love opening up discussions about what comes next in the market research sector. How can we know more about our consumers and what means do we need to take to get a better understanding of their behavior?
A was asked to be a guest lecturer in the University of Iceland for students mastering in marketing.
The future of market research
View more presentations from Gunnar Hólmsteinn.