Geir Freysson - The Internet Industrialist

Peter Day has been spending some time in Iceland and has produced two excellent episodes of his In Business radio show from “the island that went bust” as he puts it. The first episode was Iceland feels the chill and the second one was Iceland: Women.

Strangely, both episodes somehow sound optimistic. There’s light at the end of the tunnel.

In the first episode Halldór Eyjólfsson, former fisherman and CEO of 66 Degrees North, says that his company’s ads, shown above, explain the Icelandic character: “Some people say they are sad, but they’re not sad. They are fighting. They are survivors. They are living on the edge of where it’s feasible to live and they are surviving.” In fact, I know that facial expression very well. It’s how you look when the wind chill is -20° celcius.

The second episode is about the investment fund Auður Capital. It was founded by two female heavy-weights from the Icelandic investment community, Halla Tómasdóttir and Kristín Jónsdóttir, and it has feminine oriented approach to investing. “We’re prepared to use our logical intelligence as well as our emotional intelligence when it comes to investing,” they say. Their main point is that any business that is either too male or female dominated loses out on the benifits of diversity.

The situation may be bleak at the moment, but there is optimism in the entrepreneurial circles. Various Icelandic start-ups are using the sudden availability of a vast talent pool to do some very interesting things. The country will without a doubt rise from the ashes stronger than it was before, with a more diverse source of income than previously when it relied so heavily on one sector, be it aluminum, banking or cod.

I’ve put together a list of the best “big picture” business books I’ve read in the past years to demonstrate Wajapi tags and to illustrate a nifty feature I call javascript widgets (for more on js widgets, see below).

The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric Raymond: The best analysis I’ve read on the impact of open source on business models and software, written by uber geek, open source promoter and gun enthusiast(!) E. Raymond.

The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman or as I call it “globalization happened, get over it”. Another interesting read for those interested in open source and how it affects business.

The Pirate’s Dilemma by Matt Mason: Why are you reading Lawrence Lessig when you could be reading Matt Mason? Mason was a pirate radio and club DJ in London, and later became founding Editor-in-Chief of the magazine RWD. Who cares if he thinks Linux is a corporation? Read this book!

The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb - the core message of this book is “shit happens, wear a helmet” and it explains why financial risk models don’t work, why you should go to networking events and how the movie business is similar to the VC industry.

The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton M. Christensen: Of all the five books this is the most academic and best researched. Clayton’s insight into disruptive technologies has far reaching implications for any business.

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Wajapi tip: Every user’s profile page and every tag on Wajapi has a javascript widget attached to it. The list above is created by pasting the following code into the blog post:

<script src="http://www.wajapi.com/geir/tags/top_business.widget"> </script>

If I go back to Wajapi and update the list, the list on this page changes. Yay.

We’ve updated Wajapi so that registered users can change the Amazon locale Wajapi uses to search. All Amazon supported locales have been added. These are:

• Amazon.com
• Amazon.co.uk
• Amazon.fr (new)
• Amazon.de (new)
• Amazon.ca (new)
• Amazon.co.jp (new)

We don’t have any users coming in from as far east as Japan yet, but at least now they can! Click on the screenshot above to see search results for “Harry Potter” in Japanese.

To get search results in Japanese, register on the site and pick amazon.co.jp as your “amazon region”.

I’ve also added the German version of Harry’s book 7, Harry Potter und die Heiligtümer des Todes to my own booklist on Wajapi, as you can see on the sidebar to the right.

I visited friends in Copenhagen the other day and in order to afford a taxi I exchanged my British pounds for some Danish kronas. While waiting in line I noticed that Copenhagen is apparently one of the few places on earth where the exchange rate for the local currency against the Icelandic krona is publicly displayed (click on the image for a larger version). Good old Danes.

Of course, given the financial meltdown, the ISK isn’t good for much these days and on the display, it had actually flatlined.

In the good old days of the credit boom, back in July 2007, Cheltenham & Gloucester offered borrowers a tracker mortgage which would charge borrowers 1.01% less than the Bank of England’s base rate.

The Times Online now reports that on the 5th of February, the base rate might go from its current level of 1.5% to as low as 1%. This means that the tracker mortgage mentioned above would hit rock bottom, or zero percent.

However, Lloyds Banking Group, the owner of C&G say that:

because its computer systems could not cope with zero, it would be temporarily charging 0.001 per cent if base rate is cut to 1per cent.

Computer says no. Beautiful.

On Hacker news, I recently came across this quote from Dennis Chao on the pitfalls of using Doom as a system administration tool:

[One] of the problems of using Doom as a tool for system administration: Certain processes are vital to the computer’s operation and should not be killed. For example, after I took the screenshot of myself being attacked by csh, csh was shot by friendly fire from behind, possibly by tcsh or xv, and my session was abruptly terminated.

Attacked by csh and killed by friendly fire from tcsh? What’s not to like?

I just came across an excellent post from Joel Spolsky on anecdotes disguised as scientific facts:

Whether it’s Thomas Friedman, who, it seems, cannot go a whole week without inventing a new fruit-based metaphor explaining everything about the entire modern world, all based on some random jibberish he misunderstood from a taxi driver in Kuala Lumpur, or Malcolm Gladwell with his weak theories on tipping points, crazy incorrect theories on first impressions, or utterly lunatic theories on experts, it all becomes insanely popular simply because the stories are fun and interesting and everybody wants to hear a good story. Spare me.

“Fruit-based metaphor.” I like that.

While we’re on the subject of pseudo-science, we might as well cover the “pedagogic graph”. The pedagogic graph is used to illustrate an idea, rather than display any actual data. A great example is the Laffer curve, used to illustrate how lowering taxes actually increases tax revenue. It doesn’t illustrate any empirical evidence of course, it’s just a great curve.

A close relative to the pedagogic, non-empirical graph is the Pointless Diagram. I’ll leave that to the excellent Indexed blog:

A quote on a financial crisis (via 37signals):

The financial crisis in America is really a moral crisis, caused by the series of proofs which the American public has received that the leading financiers who control banks, trust companies and industrial corporations are often imprudent, and not seldom dishonest. They have mismanaged trust funds and used them freely for speculative purposes. Hence the alarm of depositors, and a general collapse of credit.

—The Economist, 1908

Tim O’Reilly on the global economy as a Ponzi scheme:

Since Bernie Madoff has put Ponzi schemes back onto the front pages, it’s worth considering whether we are all complicit in the biggest Ponzi scheme of them all, the idea that the global economy can grow indefinitely.

I recommend the article. It’s not as crazy as it might have sounded a few months ago.

The Rails and Merb web frameworks merged recently and following the announcement, DHH wrote an interesting blog post on his blog, Loud Thinking.

You can’t and shouldn’t try to make everyone love you. The best you can do is make sure that they’re hating you for the right reasons.

Another good quote on the Rails/Merb merger surfaced on Hacker News:

Rails: Merb, _I_ am your father.
Merb: Nooooooooooo!