Author Archives: Kousay Samir

Hi everyone, i have had this post as a drift since third lecture when we talked about Innovation.

In some markets innovation and creating a good product is not enough anymore. I have found this article to show http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/DanielWest/20150908/253040/Good_isnt_good_enough__releasing_an_indie_game_in_2015.php

It in my mind tells that in some markets there are so many alternatives that by just creating a good and innovative product is not enough because you will never get the amount of attention needed to succeed. this is almost comparable to mobile phones today, if a unknown company created a phone similar to Samsung they would never really be successful because the market is already full of other alternatives that one extra would not matter. This is a great discussion material, if you have any thoughts please comment!

As some of you know several others and I were on #STHLMTECH on october 13th. Tim wrote a good summary about the whole event. I just have a few of my own insights to give to you.
A big thing was that AMAZON web service is starting in Sweden just because of the amount of entrepreneurs here. this is interesting because AMAZON is a really big company worldwide.
The main point of the event was about refugees and there were a few of them that aspired to be entrepreneurs that ware on stage.  it is a good discussion to have nowadays because the migration issues are being noticed. In this part of the program they presented an idea of an app for refugees, they called it WELCOME, a place for refugees to create events and social groups. a good idea in the long run.

Another thing that was happening on the event was that I realized how hard it is to compete with other parts of the world, for example how competitive China is. They could copy a product really fast and therefore probably take your market if you are not looking out! the counter things you should create value that not only is on the hardware level. you should create an ecosystem that they would have hard time to copy. And if you are trying to compete with China you should just quit right now, their work ethics greatly exceed ours and many other countries.

Tim forgot to mention a third unannounced pitch. there was supposed to be three pitches on stage but the last group did not come, however someone from the audience came up instead with their idea (great initiative that shows the atmosphere that was!).
This pitcher had an idea about an app that lets you share advertisements on your social account and earn money that way. The investors broke down this idea very hard. however the person had great counter arguments too. The app was going to be called some thing like Payshare or Sharepay.

PS: The drink that they offered was made of green tea and tasted really bad, i guess not every Startup is good in a taste sense 🙂

Today we had an interesting exercise about teamwork and partners in business. By talking about what other things could happen after the startup of a company, more interestingly about worst case scenarios. This made me think further than the startup, what would happen if my company does not survive after an accident. Had very interesting conversations about this with Zbyszek and Erica.

We also built the most beautiful building by paper. In progress in the picture.

In the  lecture today, Serdar spoke about how Spotify fought piracy and peer-to-peer downloads. I came to think about a different company called Valve and their service Steam. Steam uses the same ideas as Spotify but for PC games. They saw that piracy was a problem and found a solution by first creating an easier platform for finding games and then creating an easier payment method with Steam wallet.

Gabe Newell, the co-founder of Valve explains his views about piracy by saying

“In general, we think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem. For example, if a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate’s service is more valuable.”

This is very interesting because it contradicts what the developers of games are doing against piracy.

Source:

Interview: http://www.tcs.cam.ac.uk/interviews/0012301-interview-gabe-newell.html

Steam: http://store.steampowered.com/