tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7758596Sun, 28 Feb 2010 23:57:34 +0000http://www.maximise.dk/blog/noreply@blogger.com (Max)Blogger35125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7758596.post-9026441580869335978Sun, 28 Feb 2010 22:31:00 +00002010-03-01T00:49:04.345+01:00Today I went to a rocket testfiring of what will probably be the first Danish launch of a human being into space. You could hear the roar of the rocket for miles as it went off strapped to a huge concrete block. That's pretty big. The bigger thing is that it's all done by a private venture. And the really amazing thing is that it's done by two ordinary guys who just decided that this is what http://www.maximise.dk/blog/2010/02/going-into-space-what-you-can-do-if-you.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Max Tobiasen)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7758596.post-8643699561558694004Thu, 06 Aug 2009 12:36:00 +00002009-08-10T16:02:29.064+02:00I know a lot of people that have started their own company, and I have even more anecdotes from forums and other sites on the web. I've noticed that there are two types of entrepreneurs. The dreamers and the doers.Kevin Rose showing the dreamers how to run a companyThe dreamers often have a romantic view of what it means to be an entrepreneur. They've seen Kevin Rose of Digg fame, they've seen http://www.maximise.dk/blog/2009/08/dreamers-and-doers.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Max Tobiasen)2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7758596.post-5689483324374826810Wed, 22 Jul 2009 21:00:00 +00002009-07-23T01:39:45.142+02:00Classical macroeconomic models are in trouble. They have difficulty predicting even the most basic things. As is apparent to anyone who bothers to go back and check the predictions and forecasts that are made by economists they are mostly just random numbers. Not because of bad faith, but because of bad models.In the current economic crisis one major school of economists, the Keynesians, proposehttp://www.maximise.dk/blog/2009/07/economists-dont-know-what-theyre.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Max Tobiasen)6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7758596.post-179973777682374729Sun, 12 Jul 2009 11:52:00 +00002009-07-16T13:31:24.328+02:00A friend just sent me his thesis on Business angel networks in Denmark as a word document. I promised to read it through and comment on it before he turns it in some time next week. I've spent the last two hours trying to open the damn thing.The core of the problem is apparently that the document is created in word 2008 and my version of word is 2003. So I get an error message, and a prompt with http://www.maximise.dk/blog/2009/07/case-fo-online-office-apps.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Max Tobiasen)4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7758596.post-5701130939985301318Wed, 08 Jul 2009 12:46:00 +00002009-07-08T15:43:11.803+02:00Today Google announced that they are launching an operating system called Chrome OS. This is a strategically very smart move.Google makes money off the web, their primary source of revenue is adsense which brings in billions of dollars a year. They are quickly diversifying their offerings with google apps, gmail, analytics and a host of other applications. All of them webbased. They are an http://www.maximise.dk/blog/2009/07/why-google-is-making-operating-system.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Max Tobiasen)19tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7758596.post-1698790821017995526Wed, 10 Jun 2009 21:40:00 +00002009-06-11T02:00:05.110+02:00When you start a company it's common to write out a best, expected and worst case scenario analysis to see how many yachts you'll be able to buy if all goes well. And how bad it'll be if nothing goes according to plan. The worst case analysis is often just the best case with little or no sales. "The worst that could ever happen is that we create a product, and not a lot of people will buy it" http://www.maximise.dk/blog/2009/06/worst-case-scenario.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Max)6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7758596.post-7638995285375284997Sun, 26 Apr 2009 22:33:00 +00002009-04-27T00:48:15.024+02:00This is a story about what it takes to start a company. It may not seem like it, but it is. I live on a boat in a harbour. It's an amazing place with just the right mix of artists, yacht owners and fishermen. As in all small communities there's a strong invisible pecking order. The fishermen are on top. They are the real men. They have survived force gale 12 storms in the bay of Biscay, they haulhttp://www.maximise.dk/blog/2009/04/moving-boat.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Max Tobiasen)2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7758596.post-8705950149968039549Thu, 16 Apr 2009 15:54:00 +00002009-04-16T00:14:51.065+02:00Setting the right price for a product has always been one of the most difficult hurdles for startups. Of course it only makes it worse that the pricing of your product is one of the most important decisions you as a businessowner will ever make. So how do you do it?If your product happens to be webbased, here's an interesting idea. But first some basic economy on what the right price is.Accordinghttp://www.maximise.dk/blog/2009/01/getting-product-pricing-right.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Max)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7758596.post-7087201309599763936Thu, 26 Mar 2009 21:18:00 +00002009-03-26T23:44:16.655+01:00For the last decade the people that have had success have primarily been bankers, brokers and othe money-pushers. I think the current crisis will mark a big shift in where money and power is centered. It will pass from financial engineers to real engineers. Barack Obama has on The tonight show pinned the zeitgeist with this quote "What we need is young people instead of them wanting to be an http://www.maximise.dk/blog/2009/03/financial-engineers-are-out-real.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Max Tobiasen)9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7758596.post-3083281857592295843Mon, 09 Mar 2009 21:00:00 +00002009-03-10T00:46:04.993+01:00Would you pay for a newssite on the Internet? If you won't you're in the vast majority.But what if we rephrase the question. Would you pay for a newssite on the Internet if there was no other free alternative? The answer would probably be yes, since there would be nowhere else for you to get that constantly updated dose of news that you're probably addicted to. So for a consumer a newssite is http://www.maximise.dk/blog/2009/03/online-news-and-prisoners-dilemma.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Max Tobiasen)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7758596.post-8067157985730055148Thu, 12 Feb 2009 21:39:00 +00002009-02-12T23:01:27.695+01:00I have a friend that's always incredibly lucky. Everything she wants just seems to fall into her lap. When she moved to Copenhagen a few years ago she found an apartment in less than a week. Not just any apartment either, but one that was cheap and located in one of the best Copenhagen neighborhoods. And it's notoriously hard to get an apartment here, let alone a cheap one. When I asked her how http://www.maximise.dk/blog/2009/02/getting-lucky-is-hard-work.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Max Tobiasen)1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7758596.post-2760214840370439677Sun, 18 Jan 2009 18:55:00 +00002009-01-18T21:26:53.108+01:00You hear the "fail early and fail often" mantra quite a bit. The basic idea is to find out as early as possible whether the project you're working on is going to be a success, and if it isn't let it fail. This is a hard thing to do: You have to accept the project as a failure, and implicitly accept that for whatever reason you didn't have what it took to suceed. There may, of course, be external http://www.maximise.dk/blog/2009/01/why-you-should-fail-early-and-fail.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Max Tobiasen)4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7758596.post-223430483858374185Thu, 08 Jan 2009 17:03:00 +00002009-01-08T19:11:44.841+01:00I've noticed that a lot of hackers and other technically capable people have problems understanding the reason for the existence of a business plan. And often fail to realise how hard a task it is to compose a good one.This post is an attempt to explain business plans in terms of programming languages.A business plan is just like a program, it's just written in the strange and difficult http://www.maximise.dk/blog/2009/01/business-plans-for-hackers.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Max Tobiasen)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7758596.post-5501917830817453026Tue, 23 Dec 2008 19:36:00 +00002008-12-23T21:26:40.253+01:00Physics deals with an interesting concept called entropy that measures the state of disorder in a closed system. The second law of thermodynamics looselly states that over time a closed system will become more disorderly and chaotic if nothing is done to prevent it. If you haven't been to your basement for a while you can go down there and see for yourself that this is true: Things have become http://www.maximise.dk/blog/2008/12/entropy-of-code.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Max Tobiasen)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7758596.post-6292833544401882322Wed, 26 Nov 2008 12:29:00 +00002008-11-26T15:11:18.011+01:00Ray Kurzweil has been advocating for the past years that we are nearing a technological singularity. He has tracked technological progress from the slide rule and up to the present day and has found that technology moves forward at an ever faster pace, and that this pace is surprisinglys constant. The slide rule could do very few calculations at a very high price. Vacuum tubes were a lot better http://www.maximise.dk/blog/2008/11/why-singularity-may-never-arrive.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Max)11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7758596.post-7473222425655227428Wed, 31 Jan 2007 22:58:00 +00002008-11-10T21:30:55.957+01:00Everything on the web seems to be about AJAX and software as a service (SAAS) these days - but is it just another fad, or will it change the way we work? I think the latter, and I will explain why.In 1996 Alan Cooper wrote "your programs posture", where he split the programs we use in our daily lives in four distinct categories - Sovereign, transient, daemonic and parasitic. Sovereign programs http://www.maximise.dk/blog/2007/01/moving-applications-to-web.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Max)2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7758596.post-4953475524001668613Thu, 11 Jan 2007 09:07:00 +00002007-01-11T14:38:26.087+01:00Outsourcing is all the rage these days, everything but my pizza delivery seems to be outsourced to India, China or some other far off place that takes away jobs. Years ago the western nations calmed themselves by agreeing that only low-tech production, assembly of paperclips and realdolls, would be outsourced - that complicated products needed our expertise. Then came callcenters. Then came http://www.maximise.dk/blog/2007/01/engineers-of-west-engineers-of-east.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Max)9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7758596.post-112612669483872774Wed, 07 Sep 2005 19:16:00 +00002005-09-13T16:23:23.966+02:00Here we go again, giants in the consumer electronics world are flexing their muscle, trying to promote, partner, steal or buy their way to dominance of the DVD format of the future. We have seen it before with betamax and VHS, but will we see it again ?.In one ringcorner is a powerful consortium consisting of Sony, Apple, Samsung, 20'th Century Fox, and a host of other players trying to promote http://www.maximise.dk/blog/2005/09/format-wars.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Max)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7758596.post-111464120493896546Wed, 27 Apr 2005 21:39:00 +00002005-04-28T00:33:24.940+02:00I remember the heyday of the Internet bubble back in the late 90's. Champagne, million dollar business plans and irrational exuberance everywhere you looked. Those were the days. But why did the bubble burst ? Were we really that ignorant ? Did the emperor have no clothes on ?I think that many of the ideas, businesses and paradigms conceived during the bubble made good sense. ( Of course, I have http://www.maximise.dk/blog/2005/04/why-bubble-burst.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Max)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7758596.post-111463797508393328Wed, 27 Apr 2005 21:32:00 +00002005-09-08T00:06:53.053+02:00Most of us are overwhelmed by information in our professional lives, and we are hard pressed to organise it in a consistent and coherent manner. This is a profound change from 10 years ago, yet we still cling to a hierarchical classification of data. We desperately roam our computers, trying to organise the overflow of information coming at us from all angles into neat folders. But for most of ushttp://www.maximise.dk/blog/2005/04/probabilistic-classification.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Max)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7758596.post-111054367213511428Wed, 06 Apr 2005 23:05:00 +00002005-04-07T15:49:46.700+02:00A friend of mine was trying to sell one of his companies a few years ago. The company in question collected sportsinformation from various sources, condensed and filtered it, and offered it as an SMS based service to media outlets, so that these could offer their customers up to date sporting information and not have to handle all the technicalities themselves. The company did quite well, and http://www.maximise.dk/blog/2005/04/why-danish-programmers-are-best-in.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Max)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7758596.post-111049751201296012Thu, 10 Mar 2005 22:59:00 +00002005-03-11T00:33:00.850+01:00Take a look at a market over time. Any market. Now look at who has the bigger marketshare: The players in the high-end or low-end of the market. In the beginning it will typically be the high-end market that dominates the market. Primarily because the market is new, the technology is hard, the idea is novel, or simply because customers are willing to pay a high price for a new commodity. http://www.maximise.dk/blog/2005/03/high-end-vs-low-end.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Max)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7758596.post-111049246212785677Thu, 10 Mar 2005 22:07:00 +00002005-03-11T00:36:06.263+01:00I find it interesting that Google has become a global brand in less than 6 years (see earlier post) and that they have done so without much marketing, if any at all. How do they do it ? Well of course they are the best of breed in their category, delivering a service that outpaces all the competitors. But then again, BetaMax was a better technology than VHS so technical superiority doesn't seem http://www.maximise.dk/blog/2005/03/good-marketing-practises.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Max)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7758596.post-110989817242357114Fri, 04 Mar 2005 01:02:00 +00002005-03-21T10:48:38.440+01:00I just saw that Intel shows off a Mac mini knock-off and tries to get on the heels of Apple in the market for designer computers. No doubt that there is a huge market for designer PC's, hell I wouldn't mind paying a 30% premium if I could get a PC that was as cool as a Mac mini. But it seems to me that Intel has missed the point of a designer computer. If you want to get a share of the market it http://www.maximise.dk/blog/2005/03/copycat.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Max)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7758596.post-110766892565044753Sun, 06 Feb 2005 05:48:00 +00002005-03-11T00:37:36.633+01:00If you have any knowledge of business you will most probably be familiar with the 80/20 rule. 80% of your sales derives from 20% of your customers, 80% of a companys profit is created by 20% of its employees, and so on and so forth. This rule of thumb is common business knowledge, and was originally devised by the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto. It is also known as the Pareto principle. If youhttp://www.maximise.dk/blog/2005/02/notes-on-8020-rule.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Max)0