I was invited to a breakfast meeting by Nordea to listen to the forner currency exchange broker Villhelm Jensen. He told us that if we spend 5 minutes using Nordea e-Markets every week we could minimize the currency risks quite a lot. I’ve been using e-Markets now for a couple of years and I’m very pleased with it, but I guess I’m only using a fragment of the potential in the program. I will sheduele some more time to learn more but I strongly recommend it for those who trade foreign money frequently.
Villhelm told us e-Market is a great way for small companies to start doing advance currency business without having a personal currency exchange broker.
I watched a seminar with Teo Hären from Interesting.org about how you can improve your creativity. You have to start practice! And yes, you can practice to be more creative. Watch this seminar (in swedish) or visit his homepage. It’s worth every minute!
I hade the opportunity to inspire and learn some of the most promising young male students in Sweden and Norway about leadership at an conference in Strömstad last Friday. I used an Prezi slideshow with some headlines. You can view it here:
Here is the comments from some of the attendees:
· Jag blev med målmedveten
· Man kände igen sig i mkt det han sa, tankeställare
Charlotte Lindeberg (Svenskt Näringsliv), Gustaf Josefsson (YEoS), Sofia Appelgren (MittLiv & Wild'n Fresh)
I think you can imagine how happy Gustaf Josefsson was a few days ago when he arranged a meeting between YEoS, Svenskt Näringsliv and Sofia Appelgren as a speaker, just look at the picture! Sofia spoke about her wild story between her restaurant Wild’n Fresh and the public trade union. If you have the opportunity to listen to her, do it! Or buy her book.
Nowadays she runs a company called MittLiv which fights for equal rights for young people with a background from foreign countries.
The discussions were great and I think everyone got something out of this event. I also met this young entrepreneur: Sebastian Stjern – A really inspiring guy and founder of The Fair Tailor (in Nepal) which make fair trade and ecological fine custom-made shirts. They also employ persons who due to their past are unlikely to be employed anywhere else – e.g. adult former street children.
He also runs a really great blog for Swedish entrepreneurs called Entreprenörsbloggen – check it out!
If you aren’t convinced yet that social media is a fundamental shift in the way we communicate please watch these stunning videos. I think you might change your mind.
Even thought some of the facts in the videos are controversial you will have to face the facts that social media is bigger than we think.
By 2010 Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers….96% of them have joined a social network
Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web
1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media
Years to Reach 50 millions Users: Radio (38 Years), TV (13 Years), Internet (4 Years), iPod (3 Years)…Facebook added 100 million users in less than 9 months…iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.
If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 4th largest between the United States and Indonesia
Yet, some sources say China’s QZone is larger with over 300 million using their services (Facebook’s ban in China plays into this)
comScore indicates that Russia has the most engage social media audience with visitors spending 6.6 hours and viewing 1,307 pages per visitor per month – Vkontakte.ru is the #1 social network
2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction
1 in 6 higher education students are enrolled in online curriculum
% of companies using LinkedIn as a primary tool to find employees….80%
The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females
Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres have more Twitter followers than the entire populations of Ireland, Norway and Panama
80% of Twitter usage is on mobile devices…people update anywhere, anytime…imagine what that means for bad customer experiences?
Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé…In 2009 Boston College stopped distributing e-mail addresses to incoming freshmen
What happens in Vegas stays on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook…
The #2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube
Wikipedia has over 13 million articles…some studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica…78% of these articles are non-English
There are over 200,000,000 Blogs
54% = Number of bloggers who post content or tweet daily
Because of the speed in which social media enables communication, word of mouth now becomes world of mouth
If you were paid a $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia you would earn $156.23 per hour
Facebook USERS translated the site from English to Spanish via a Wiki in less than 4 weeks and cost Facebook $0
25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content
34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands
People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services than how Google ranks them
78% of consumers trust peer recommendations
Only 14% trust advertisements
Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI
90% of people that can TiVo ads do
Hulu has grown from 63 million total streams in April 2008 to 373 million in April 2009
25% of Americans in the past month said they watched a short video…on their phone
According to Jeff Bezos 35% of book sales on Amazon are for the Kindle when available
24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation because we no longer search for the news, the news finds us.
In the near future we will no longer search for products and services they will find us via social media
More than 1.5 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared on Facebook…daily.
Successful companies in social media act more like Dale Carnegie and less like David Ogilvy Listening first, selling second
Successful companies in social media act more like party planners, aggregators, and content providers than traditional advertiser
I was interviewed by Founders Alliance 26th of may 2009. Unfortunately the interview was in swedish. The topic was entrepreneurship. Hopefully I will give an interview in english soon. Here is the link of the video if the above link doesn’t work: Viktor Nord talks about entrepreneurship . If you have some time of and want to help me with some votes for a competition I would be glad. Here is the link – Link for voting . Have a great day and thanks for reading/watching/voting.
A couple of weeks ago I got nominated for best young entrepreneur in Sweden (west side). This was really flattering but my expectations was small. I was up against more promosing and much better entrepreneurs such as Eric Martinsson & Therese Albrechtson. Against my expectations I won that nomination and now I’m one of the finalists in the national event in Stockholm. They recorded a video of me. Unfortunately the video is in Swedish but you’re welcome to have a look anyway even though you don’t understand. Just click on the picture below:
Jurys motivation: ” This year’s young entrepreneur in western Sweden has developed a service to help very many people to get work. Thousands of people have been recruited to Norwegian companies already. The contractor proved the first step in an interesting business building. The contractor is focused and has the ambition to take the company forward to the next “Ryan Air – Recruitment”
The winner of this award will be presented at the Entrepreneur Gala in Stockholm the 24th of September 2009. The elite of the Swedish entrepreneurs are there and the event is stunning. If you cast a vote on any of the competitors you have the oppertunity to win free tickets. I would really appreciate that you cast your vote on the most promising entrepreneur and not just on me if you personally know me. Honestly I think I don’t have a chance against the other competitors. What do you think?
Up against the Swedish young elite:
My competitors Marcus, Mattias and Ida are all three very successful entrepreneurs and they all deserve to win this competition. Unfortunately I don’t know them personally yet, but I hope I will meet them in Stockholm the 24th of September when the winner is named.
Sverige-Norge.se has been successfull thanks to this amazing person Christian Josefsson. He has been involved since the beginning and is one of the owners. I gladely thank Christian for his incredible job of building up our company from almost nothing to a successfull company. He is not just one of the best art-directors on the market but an true enrepreneur and a big inspiration to work with. I think you all have met a person in your life that has the magic touch and succeed with everything? That’s Christian!
Thank you for reading this post. If you want to support me please share this post on your social network. I would really appriceate it. Now I just want to wish you a fantastic summer of 2009! Take care.
24 years old entrepreneur. Started my first company by the age of 16. Since 2007 I've been working with my recruitment company called Sverige-Norge.se. Board member at Young Entrepreneurs of Sweden, board member at Ung Företagsamhet, spoke person at Svenskt Näringsliv, mentor for young entrepreneurs, speaker and trainer in leadership, consultant. You can read more about me or find me on the social networks such as LinkedIN, Twitter, Facebook, Google or Young Entrepreneurs of Sweden