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.

Five panelists from five companies representing five different operating systems with five sets of competing interests – and one goal: Dominate the mobile market.

The result for the end-user?

Ewen Macleod, from The Mobile Industry Review summed it up nicely at the bloggers’ panel talk:

All this “isn’t the future of mobile great” talk – let’s take a reality check: It’s an absolutely shit experience. The mobile industry right now? Piece of shit.

People are frustrated with the fragmentation of the mobile industry. Multiple operators, operating systems and handset manufacturers, none of them cooperating properly, make starting or running a business that is based on mobile applications a royal pain.

So what is the future of mobile? How can this be fixed? Dare Obasanjo put it nicely in a recent post:

Which makes more sense, that every Web site in the world should create duplicate versions of their pages for mobile phones and regular browsers or that software + hardware would eventually evolve to the point where I can run a full fledged browser on the device in my pocket?

Just as it did for the personal computer, the web will bring the fragmented mobile phone markets together. The mobile web is dead, long live the web!

The economic situation is apparently so grim that some experts fear we may be in for a stretch as bad as the mid seventies.

When Microsoft and Apple were founded.

…

Someone who thinks “I better not start a startup now, because the economy is so bad” is making the same mistake as the people who thought during the Bubble “all I have to do is start a startup, and I’ll be rich.”

when the market goes down, people want measurable advertising, and the internet is the most measurable, performance-based advertising … so it’ll actually be good, long-term, for the internet.

The Economist had an interesting article on this back in 2006, The ultimate marketing machine, with a great quote from John Wanamaker, who not only invented department stores and price tags, but also became the first modern advertiser when he bought space in newspapers to promote his stores.

Wanamaker said: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is, I don’t know which half.”

The Future of Web Apps expo last week (FOWA) started and ended on a religious note.

When I arrived on Thursday morning, I was greeted by hordes of people wearing red MyChurch t-shirts. “Good morning, good morning, good morning,” each of them greeted every new arrival.

At first I thought they might be a start-up at FOWA pulling a marketing stunt. But no, MyChurch, the christian social network, already is a thriving social network with an expo of their own.

Highlights of the FOWA expo itself included Languages don’t scale by Blaine Cook and Joe Stump and Huddle’s Andy McLoughlin’s part of How to survive prosper outside Silicon Valley (fast-forward into the middle for Andy’s part).

The expo ended in the same surreal way it started, except instead of MyChurch, this time it was the cult of Diggnation. The difference was not as obvious as one might have thought.

The expo itself was good fun and the Carsonified team obviously know how to stage these events. Kudos to them.

For a more detailed recap check out Mycycle and for a report from the fringe, the new media whore blog.

Other people I met there were from Playfire, Hypernumbers and Timetoast.

The mastermind behind the meetup, Ian Hogarth of Songkick, wrote an article on Techcrunch recently titled Hey, Hackers need friends too! explaining the thinking behind the event.

A vast majority of the people at Hacker meetup #5 were people straight from the trenches, i.e. founders and techies. This was a refreshing angle compared to various other networking events. Kudos to the Songkick folks for the initiative.

The interesting part however, is in the article title. Animoto’s technology is very resource hungry because the service is based on video. That means lots of expensive hardware.

Instead of investing in servers, they decided to outsource to the cloud:

We made the decision that we would re-implement the entire stack on Amazon Web Services in lieu of just using a regular hosting provider. That was a tough decision. We had to delay our launch by three months.

This paid off. When the Facebook app brought them all the new users:

the number of servers required to create these Animoto videos scaled from 50 to 5,000 in [a week]. [With] our own serving room [or a] hosting provider, it’s impossible to have 50 physical servers and grow it to 5,000 servers in that period of time. It’s insane. …

But with Amazon’s webservices:

the only real asset we have in our office, and the biggest thing we bought recently, was a fancy espresso machine.

This does mean that when Amazon has problems, so does Animoto.

Nonetheless, thanks to Amazon, the only hardware infrastructure a startup needs to support 700,000 users is one espresso machine.