Gunnar Holmsteinn talks

Looking for a Biz Dev Intern.

Sat, 01 Oct 2011 20:52:00 +0100

We’re looking for someone awesome to join us in our San Francisco office!

About CLARA

CLARA is a funded startup disrupting the way companies treat their customers. We just launched in the US and are growing rapidly. We offer community analytics, monitoring and engagement for more than 100 enterprise clients, including Sony, CCP, The Coca-Cola Company, Microsoft and Vodafone. At CLARA, 16 experienced and energetic persons work full time towards world domination.

About the gig;

Work directly with the CEO
Work on sales related projects
Create and execute a Social Media Marketing campaign
Support VP of Sales in daily tasks
Researching potential leads
Get great ideas and follow them through
Brainstorm business strategies + Have a blast!

What we require;

Business Administration student focusing on: Development, Marketing, and Sales
A desire to become a top tier sales and marketing person
True to your word (do what you say you’ll do)
A positive, creative, and results driven attitude
Being a video game player really helps.

Perks and Benefits;

Although this is an unpaid internship we offer;

A very compelling environment to learn and gain experience rapidly.
We are flexible on work hours, but in return we expect great work and that projects are delivered so that you can be proud of them.
We support healthy habits and work out every day
Completion of Internship hours for college credit course
Experience the launch of a product in early stages and in a Startup environment

Do you know someone awesome that might fit this profile?

Interested? Email Rick Vidrio (rick at clarahq dot com) for further details!

A step-by-step guide on building a Constitution - Iceland Style (#iceOS)

Wed, 15 Jun 2011 03:28:00 +0100

You can describe a nations Constitution in multiple ways. The description I love the most is “The Nations Operating System” one (or even the BIOS). Simply because a constitution is the bases for everything else; it’s the fundamental principles on how the government and organization (applications) should work.

Constitutions are not written that often. It’s also not everyday that you get the chance to participate in writing one. My lovely home country, Iceland, is currently doing just that as a few places have mentioned;

I’ve had the privilege to participate in the process, mostly on the tech side of things but also in the build-up, planning and a lot of viewing from the sideline.

If your are wondering how to follow Iceland’s steps, look no further, Here is a simple step-by-step guide on how to build a new constitution from scratch.

Step #0 (1849)

Adopt a constitution from someone else. Icelanders copied the danish constitution, but used Find+Replace on “King” for “President”.

Step #1 (2004)

Convince yourself that you’ll become the financial capital of the world.

Step #2 (October 2008)

#fail

Step #3 (early 2009)

Rethink your ethos.

You’ll need a great communicator and visionary to lead the planning. We had Gudjon Mar Gudjonsson who along with the most prominent CEO’s and entrepreneurs of Iceland founded the Ministry of Ideas. In times of massive pessimism and whining, this group looked at the bright side and encouraged innovation, openness and even went as far as producing some large events (see next step)

Step #4 (14th of November 2009)

Produce a large-scale visioning event. Gather 1.500 people in one single room (a sports hall) and have them brainstorm about “the future values of Iceland and how to get there.”

UPDATE: In this 2009 assembly about 1,500 people participated in the meeting. The participants were divided into 162 groups, consisting of 9 people each. Of those about 1.200 where randomly selected to form a representative sample from the population of Iceland. The other 300 where hand picked people in power, politics, business and media; people who could really push the outcome further into action.

Now this is a big task, we used about 500 volunteers in total, but don’t worry, we created a well documented methodology and a creative commons handbook. This process release on creativity and group spirit so it has to take place in the physical world. We used post-it’s and sharpies, had runners collect them and typists punch them into a database. Then we used text-mining analyse it in real-time and to group thoughts and ideas into similar theme. We came up with 9 themes.

Step #5 (6th of November 2010)

Repeat step #4 but now you should focus on “what should our constitution be about”. This created the National Assembly about our Constitution.

UPDATE: In this 2010 assembly the sample was purely random, but also a bit more representative as the government paid for travel related expenses.

Step #6 (27th of November 2010)

Create a new “Constitutional Council” and call for a national vote, get a diverse group of people from all walks of life.

Step #7 (Februar - June 2011)

The first and most important think is to give the newly elected Constitutional Council freedom and independence. That way entrepreneurs and thought leaders like council member Vilhjalmur Thorsteinsson can change the work methods quite drastically. From formal governmental bureaucracy to eXtreme agile methods of iterating the constitution every week.

Also make sure to bring onboard a internet life form as the CTO. Ours is Finnur Magnusson, who is now connecting the whole Constitution writing process to Google Docs, Facebook, flickr, YouTube, Twitter and a Wiki.

Step #8 (17th of June 2011)

After the Constitutional Council has worked hard for a few months on re-engineering the constitutions. Call together a league of hackers to stress-test the constitution using text analysis, threat analysis and a cocktail of other analytical techniques. This document is the operating system of our community and as such, it must be bullet proof.

Step #9

(We’re working on it, will let you know)

TEDx Silicon Valley

Mon, 13 Jun 2011 16:15:39 +0100

On Saturday May 14 2011 TEDx Silicon Valley will gathered some of the world’s leading thinkers and doers at Stanford to discuss social innovation and explore the emerging concept of Living by Numbers.

I predicted ”Watch out for Volcanos”.

On Saterday 21 May 2011 at 19:25 UTC, an eruption began, it was the strongest in Grímsvötn in the last 100 years. It disrupted 900 flights in Greenland, Norway, Svalbard, Denmark, Northern Ireland, England and Northern Germany.

I’m categorizing this post as #Nostradamus.

02011 Goals

Fri, 31 Dec 2010 13:04:00 +0000

Professional

CLARA has a ton of internal goals but I’m not going to go into much details, here are only the main goals that are on my plate;

Move to the San Francisco Bay Area to be closer to our clients.
20x increase in revenue
Double+ the production output by strengthening the development team with new talents
Set up a more structured financial management process (boring but necessary for fast growth)
Conquer planet earth, move to next.

Personal

I’ve usually set my personal goals on the day before my birthday, but now I wanted to join them with my professional goals for 02011 so I’ll break the habit and make them 16 days before my birthday.

Compete in at least 3 bike competitions
Train 208 times (cardiovascular, strength and flexibility training)
Swim 208 miles
Read 52 books (listening to audiobooks counts as well)
Meet 52 very smart people and pick their brains

Notes:

I might add some goals later on.

Creativity at Work

Wed, 20 Oct 2010 23:22:44 +0100

Creativity at Work conference was held at Reykjavik University 15th of October 02010. I was asked to talk about the hottest start-up on earth.

We had some great talks over there. I loved the enthusiasm in the both the speakers and the crowed. My number one takeaway was that you should rather stay home when you are sad, then when you are sick, because creativity really fosters in happiness.

Here are my slides as well as a few points about what I talked. I could talk forever about our environment, spirit and culture, but here are just a few points. I tried to focus on the office, or to be exact, the bar - we at CLARA are doing whatever we can to to make the place where we spend most of our time, look less like an office and more like an bar. Being a high-tech start-up, that’s basic! The things that we think are needed to run a successful bar/start-up are the following;

A Keg. Grabbing a beer after work should be as easy as possible.
Openness. We try to be as open as possible. We have a blog that’s open to all the team members, advisers, board and investors. There we share detailed information on our key performance indicators; progress, money, products and so forth.
Methods. Living and breathing in an extremely fast environment calls for disciplined methods. We stick to agile project management and love it.
Team. When everything is put right together, getting awesome talent to join your team is a bit easier. It’s still extremely hard, but a bit easier.
Organic. We’re not just talking about building an garden in the middle of the office. Also the spirit and the culture must be genuine and organic.

I’m looking forward to learning even more stuff about running a fun start-up / bar - so if you guys have any ideas, don’t hesitate to let me know!

The English Pub: Spin The Wheel.

Sat, 16 Oct 2010 19:16:00 +0100

Here’s a quick post about a wheel in downtown Reykjavik and information about when you should spin it, rather then ordering a beer.

On Austurstræti (a street below the main street Laugavegur) in Iceland is a nice little place called The English Pub. I like the atmosphere there and it’s currently my number one place during the workweek when you really need to have a good time. I can highly recommend it for a great Wednesday night out (Wednesdays are the new Thursdays).

They have live shows every night, but their main attraction is the lucky wheel, for 1.500 ISK you can spin the wheel and drink away the prize!

But how lucky is it?⁽¹⁾

Here we can see that there are 16 different fields.

2 Shots
Spin Again
1 Meter Beer (10 Small Beers)
Sorry
3 Large Beers
Spin Again
1 Large Beer
Sorry
2 Large Beers
Sorry
8 Large Beers
Sorry
1 Large Beer
Spin Again
4 Large Beers
Sorry

If you hit “Spin Again” you spin the wheel again so we don’t need to take that into account when calculating the expected outcome, that leaves 13 fields that matter.

We know how much each of the items costs at The English Pub charges;

Shots are 700.- ISK each.
Small Beers are 600.- ISK each.
Large beers are 800.- ISK each.
A Sorry is free of charge.

From this information we can derive the value of each outcome;

2 Shots = 1.400.- ISK
1 Meter Beer (10 Small Beers) = 6.000.- ISK
Sorry = 0.- ISK
3 Large Beers = 2.400.- ISK
1 Large Beer = 800.- ISK
Sorry = 0.- ISK
2 Large Beers = 1.600.- ISK
Sorry = 0.- ISK
8 Large Beers = 6.400.- ISK
Sorry = 0.- ISK
1 Large Beer = 800.- ISK
4 Large Beers = 3.200.- ISK
Sorry = 0.- ISK

With very simple calculations we find that the expected value of a fair spin⁽²⁾ is 1.738.- ISK. That is higher then 1.500.- ISK, the cost of spinning the wheel.

So to conclude;

Spin the Wheel!

⁽¹⁾ I’m not going to take into account the fun side of getting 8 large beer with a couple of your friends and how that effects the fun’nes of the evening.

⁽²⁾ I’m assuming that the wheel is not rigged and each field

Update 1

Below is a simulation done my friend Agnar Darri. He graphs expected total value as a function of total number of spins.

Update 2

Update suggested by Björgvin Ragnarsson.

When you feel like ordering a meter of beer you probably won’t ask for 10 small beers. The small beer at English is about 330 ml. If you use the liter price for large beers the cost is 5.280.- instead of 6.000.- so this changes the Expected Value to 1.683.- ISK

We still Spin The Wheel!

Update 3

It turns out that the beer is way cheaper on weekdays before 11 o’clock now in October or only 500 ISK. So now we calculate for both Update 2 (Using the liter price of large beers for the meeter) and spinning on a week day. That makes the expected value 1.092.- which is lower then the cost of spinning the wheel!

Also, we calculate that when the price of beer is less then 707.- ISK, you shouldn’t Spin the Wheel.

Don’t Spin the Wheel!

(…on weekdays before 23:00 in October)

Ice Cream at CLARA today! We just signed an agreement with CCP....

Wed, 15 Sep 2010 16:22:00 +0100

Ice Cream at CLARA today! We just signed an agreement with CCP. We are delivering the awesome CLARA system to them 1. of Oct

Skyrr Fall Conference

Fri, 10 Sep 2010 14:45:00 +0100

Skýrr, the biggest the biggest IT company in Iceland is doing their annual “Haustráðstefna Skýrr“ right now. About 700 people attended to see the likes of James Gosling - the father of Java, Hjalmar Gislason in DataMarket, Andres Jonsson the social PR guru of Iceland, Helga Waage from Mobilitus and two Alli’s from CCP. Also a ton of other great speakers talked alot about a bunch of different stuff.

I was asked to speak about the state of Icelandic companies engaged in New Media.

The main points where about

A quick introduction about CLARA and the things we have been working on.
A story about Brimborg, an Icelandic car dealership, that has been very engaged in social media in Iceland.
The difference in the discussion in traditional media and new media. I took a political example from Reykjavik and our comedian / mayor.
Another story about how a big bank in Iceland listened to the discussion about a charity they where running alongside the Reykjavik Marathon - they found out that they needed to push it way harder for people to contribute.

The talk was in Icelandic so the slides where that as well, here they are:

Haustráðstefna Skýrr on Prezi

6 reasons for bootstrapping before accepting VC money

Tue, 04 May 2010 20:55:00 +0100

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 “Bootstrap” it left a huge question mark on my face. I immediately thought about my statistics courses in the university; why in the world would my start up need to to derive estimates of confidence intervals for estimators of parameters of some statistical distributions. I actually thought about some of the R programs I wrote and started thinking how that could be applied. I eventually said that there was no need for that anytime soon, maybe a few years down the road. That left an even bigger question mark on the face of the guy I was chatting with.

It turns out that Bootstrapping is also a phrase in business finance. It’s about keeping a tight fist on all your expenses and knowing that Cash Flow is more important than your mother. Something we’ve always been keen on doing but never had the correct lingo for it. In the past two years, we’ve put a huge emphasis on doing stuff that people, especially the people that pay us, like. The team has been very focused on organic growth and building our company the way we want.

In my mind, starting with little to no cash and working your way up is a very healthy start for a young company having to figure out how to make a great product.

Here are my Top 6 reasons why I think it’s important to start by bootstrapping:

#1: Vision

We managed to justify a greater evaluation of our company simply by waiting. The founding members will still hold a majority stake in the company for years to come. This is not all done with out help so we will of course continue to learn from the best around and surround ourselves with big thinking leaders.

When we started CLARA we knew exactly what we wanted to achieve. We didn’t write the typical mission statement because we found that was too forced. Instead we had two mantras that we still look at today when we are thinking about our next moves.

First: we want to help companies understand their customers.

Second: we want to make the environment for market research better by developing the technology needed.

This is our vision. Staying true to it is more important to us than anything else. These mantras are embraced by every member of our team which help with every decision they have to make throughout our development.

#2: Building

By bootstrapping we’ve had the freedom to build the company our way, not just copying some culture from outside ‘owners’. We have a simple rule banning cords on the floor because that interferes with all the skateboarding and just recently we cracked open a wall to fit in our new bar. Those things, and hundreds more like them, form the companies culture; our culture.

#3: Proof

When you show results, asking for money gets a lot easier. There are loads of people out there with great business plans who say that all they need is X amount of millions so they can build the most awesome products you’ll ever see. That’s not gonna happen, unless they’ve already made someone very rich. By building cash flow and getting solid reoccurring revenues, you are not only getting the money, you are also getting the best proof there is that you have something worth investing in.

#4: Options

Once you don’t need money, you’re in a great position to talk to investors. There’s nothing more frustrating to them than someone not needing their money, and that’s a good thing. We got to pick the very best investor that suited our “super awesome growth strategy”^{©. Our new boardmember brings in a vast amount of knowledge in the high-tech start up scene and a great international network since their venture fund invests in the US, Europe and Asia.}

#5: Team

When bootstrapping, you’re making sure that your team members don’t become too spoiled and careless. The team understands that their paycheck totally depends on their efforts and it really makes them sprint to perfection!

I’m truly honored to work with such a great team. I love you guys!

No homo.

#6: Debt-Free

By bootstrapping, we’ve never had to owe anything to anyone. At one point we had the option to borrow money from the banks, but chose not to because we knew we could pull through. When you are running a company in an economy where a greater majority of companies are legally bankrupt, the young debt-free start-up is the prettiest girl at the ball.

Being dept free is awsome when negotioting, whether it’s lowering the rent at your new office or talking to some VC’s. Put yourself in the shoes of a VC investor, would you invest in an tail of old dept? Or would you look at the young energetic start-up that only needs money to grow, expand and scale their proven technology

How to bootstrap?

I sincerely recommend focusing on organic growth and building up your start-up the Bootstrapping style, here are a few tips from what we’ve done over the past 2 years.

To save money, we’ve …
… applied to every grant there is, and received all of them, minus one
… borrowed desks and chairs from a great friend!
… bought used computers
… bought used sub-par servers, and thats actully helped us write even better and faster code!
… borrowed (read: stole) internet from a neighbor… eaten noodles!… never paid rent, by jumping between incubators
… stolen pens and a stabler at client meetings
… used cheap post-it notes and scotch tape
… Ikea!!
… attended all lectures and cocktail parties known to man that have free food and drinks
… only hired people we desperately need, and brought them in as shareholders as well
… drunk beer with very smart people, instead of paying for expensive consultants

… and loads of other stuff!

Interdisciplinary Start-ups

Wed, 28 Apr 2010 14:49:19 +0100

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 Start-ups on Prezi

Innovit Entrepreneurship Competition

Sun, 25 Apr 2010 18:24:00 +0100

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, this years runner up was the Transmit Team with Brand Asset management program Brand Capital. I’m looking forward to the Beta!

I was asked to talk my experience during the last two years and share my thoughts on what we thought was important in starting a startup.

The following five points are things that I believe have helped us a lot;

1. Talk.

Whenever you get the chance, talk about your idea with all the enthusism you’ve got. You will get better at explaining your ideas, get great advice about your next steps and people will gladly introduce you to people who can help you.

2. Speed.

Do everything as fast as you can and in as little time as you can. Build a prototype and throw it out there to get feedback. Fix it as fast as you can and iterate. You should always have something new to say to the people asking you, especially if they are investors, they love progress.

3. Honesty.

Although you want to hype your idea or product, building to high expectations is never, ever, a good thing. You should be very proud of the what you got today and talk very highly of those things.

4. Team.

When everything is going great, you will run out of time and will need more talent to join you. When you get to that point, hire people that are way smarter then you.

5. Have Fun

Starting a company is just about the most difficult thing I can think of. It’s going to take way more time then you can ever imagine. So you’ve got to have some fun while doing so.

This is translated from Icelandic. This is also just a short recap. I hoping to spend some more time on writing this.

Ministry of Ideas Explained

Wed, 31 Mar 2010 12:26:00 +0100

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 come of this and decided to meet weekly, the topics for each meetup where to be posted at our facebook page.

This was the beginning of the Ministry of Ideas. A think tank focusing on the brighter side of a total economic meltdown. A grassroot organization set up to communicate knowledge and facilitate networking among Icelandic entrepreneurs. Operating without any constraints, strings to financiers or favors to politicians.

During this past year the Ministry has exceeded everyones expectations, with loads of powerful stuff originated within, and spun of to make the world, starting with Iceland, just a little bit better. Those project include;

An TEDxReykjavik event bringing great Icelandic minds together for some talks.
Society Initiative (Samfélagið Frumkvæði). An online meeting place for A) Ideas B) Location and C) Knowledge.
A one pager to the leaders of the G20 nations. Outlining how Iceland is the perfect country for prototyping a more sustainable world. It got Obama to say; “let’s check Iceland out”
House of Ideas. The mission is to create 500 new jobs in two years. The University of Reykjavik and the Academy of Arts are running the show. So far so great!
Ministry of Ideas dot is - Getting great ideas into the right channels for execution. I’ll explain in more detail:

The Ministry of Ideas dot is

It’s purpose is to get the truckloads of great ideas in front of the right people, and make them happen!

You simply post your idea, it’s as simple as posting a new status on Twitter or Facebook. Then your idea gets it’s own life, people can agree or disagree, they can enter arguments or counter-arguements against it. People can even vote arguments helpful, or not. The purpose here is to bring the discussion up to a greater level. Have people discuss it from both sides and let newcomers make up their own mind.

On to the next great bit of The Ministries Garden, or whatever a thing like this is called, Social-voting?… The active users, those who take part in the discussions, vote on ideas and comment, get ‘Karma-Points’, a made up quantity that is used to get a better idea about who cares the most and has the most to say about certain topics.

Once a week, the most prominent ideas get a chance to be featured in a radio talk show in front of about 40% of the nation. Thais gets more people excited, or worried, about the idea and brings another wave of civilized discussion. When ideas are thoroughly though out, they are brought to a dicision maker. If it’s an idea on schools, the gyus with the most related ‘Karma-Points’ get an hour long meeting with the Minister of Education.

If it’s an idea about creating a Start-up competition that ends with an prototype (but not a business plan) it’s brought to the attention af a VC, an incubator and maybe a Ministry. And that, me deer friends is exactly what happend today!

Prototyping

An idea i posted only 7 weeks ago gained great traction and is now in the hands of Auður Capital, who runs BJÖRK VC. Innovit, Innovation and Enrepreneurship Center and the Minister of Industry.

Here’s a short video where I explain the concept in Icelandic.

If you look at the bigger picture here it’s not that we have a voting system. Democracy is, hopefully, not new to most of us. It’s the process and getting great ideas in front of those who can make it happen.

Global Entrepreneurship Congress

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 12:34:00 +0000

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 didn’t get a change to attend this one. However I had a small role in their opening ceremony via video. A few months back Hillary Clinton, Richard Branson and I created a short video explaining the Global Entrepreneurship Week.

One Young World in the University of Iceland

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 00:58:08 +0000

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

The One Young World Summit

Sat, 13 Feb 2010 15:12:00 +0000

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 Seedorf, Wyclef Jean and HRH Haakon of Norway where among the councellors of One Young World and listend to our Ideas.

I talked about the following points:

In Iceland we hve this small economic thing
Leave us alone and well take our icy weather back
I would rather want to focus on the brighter side of a complete economic meltdown
A few weeks after the economic downturn we founded the Ministry of Ideas
Gathering great ideas and finding the right channels for execution and implementation
The National Assembly with .5% of icelanders in a single room, what matters?
Iceland as a country for prototypng a sustainable society
Baracks Obama interest on our One Pager!
How can we start Ministries of Ideas all over our ONE world?

Overall a great experience!

PR association lunch meeting

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 19:07:00 +0000

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. However, I feel that we can change this a whole lot faster! I also showed them our new product, Vaktarinn, and got a feeling that most of them would give it a spin.

PS. I ordered “loku”, which i thought was a sandwich but turned out to be some kind of marginally good fish, can’t say I recommend it.

University Ventures

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 20:03:00 +0000

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 company to today. With great emphasis on openness! Openness it has helped us get great input, raise awareness and get people so interested our idea that they quit their “high-salery/low-fun” job and join our exciting adventures!

Global Entrepreneurship Week

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000

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 people to embrace innovation, imagination and creativity. To think big. To turn their ideas into reality. To make their mark.

Hillary Clinton, Richard Branson and I made a short video explaining the concept:

999 Social Media Conference

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 15:24:00 +0100

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 message. Then a few words about the differences between the traditional Market Research and the way of Listening.

2) A few do’s and dont’s in a story form. The Dell Hell story as the first huge example of how not to do things and the story of how Scott Monty used is Jedi Social Skills to extinsh a potential PR fiasco for Ford

3) Finally a case study from the first Icelandic company to systematically listened to the online discussion: news, blogs, comments and forums. A prime example about how to listen there customers thoughts and worries.

Would love to hear your thoughts!

What is a Brand?

Fri, 13 Mar 2009 14:05:00 +0000

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 brand statement or any presentations.

How do you define a brand?