In their post “Share ideas to the maximum” on Wednesday, Financial Times has a profile of French (now Silicon Valley) entrepreneur Loïc Le Meur. Why he moved to San Francisco can quickly be summarized as (using his own words);

The way you do partnerships here, everyone’s a block away or 20 minutes away in Palo Alto. If I need to set up a partnership with [micro-blogging service] Twitter, I call them, we have coffee, and two hours later the deal is done. If I were in France, there’s a nine-hour time difference and it’s like you don’t matter.

Included in the post are his ten rules for start-up success. Reprinted below:

1. Don’t wait for a revolutionary idea. It will never happen. Just focus on a simple, exciting, empty space and execute as fast as possible
2. Share your idea. The more you share, the more you get advice and the more you learn. Meet and talk to your competitors.
3. Build a community. Use blogging and social software to make sure people hear about you.
4. Listen to your community. Answer questions and build your product with their feedback.
5. Gather a great team. Select those with very different skills from you. Look for people who are better than you.
6. Be the first to recognise a problem. Everyone makes mistakes. Address the issue in public, learn about and correct it.
7. Don’t spend time on market research. Launch test versions as early as possible. Keep improving the product in the open.
8. Don’t obsess over spreadsheet business plans. They are not going to turn out as you predict, in any case.
9. Don’t plan a big marketing effort. It’s much more important and powerful that your community loves the product.
10. Don’t focus on getting rich. Focus on your users. Money is a consequence of success, not a goal.

These “rules” may not fit any business profile, but they do make sense and could very well serve as guidelines for anyone. Feel free to add to these rules or share your success story!

In the ongoing “save the planet” campaign WWF demonstrates how small day-to-day activities can play an essential part. IF this can help saving a few thousand trees then it’s all worth it…

Click photo to enlarge.

Now I have an excuse when I wipe my hands on my pants instead. Thanks WWF!

According to Mozilla 125.000.000 people are using the foundations browser (Firefox).

John Lilly, chief operating officer i Mozilla, writes in a blog post that there’s now 125 million Firefox users. This is almost double the amount compared to when Firefox 2 was released last autumn.

The numbers are based on Mozillas Application Update Service (AUS). If Firefox is open and you are connected to the Internet it will check for updates daily. This way Mozilla can also track the number of installed and running browsers. The latest release was out last Friday by the way (2.0.0.11).

However, the number of users are not absolute it’s merely a prognosis. Lilly writes that number of “pings” received by AUS has been multiplied by 3. This is supposed to be a standard way of measuring unique users, at least in USA, and implies 3 persons sharing the same PC on average per week. Lilly himself thinks the FF user number are a conservative estimate.

NRKsport.no repeats last years success and allows their users to play NRK Ski Challenge.

NRK Ski Challenge 2008 is a game where the players can run down the same hills that are part of the Alpine world cup.

• Download Ski Challenge 2008 (English and Norwegian)

1 hill are already in place and 4 more are scheduled; Groeden, Bormio, Wengen, Kitzbuehel and Val d’Isère. You need to qualify in order to join the race, and initially you will only be able to ski Groeden. The remaining 4 hills will be included in forthcoming Internet updates.

Being a free game the quality is surprisingly good, and an excellent break from work during lunch hour. You can also take part in an on-line competition for a period of time. The Internet “skier” with the best overall score from all the hills wins the competition. To claim the price I suppose you will have to be Norwegian, but it’s a fun game anyhow…

When competition ends you will still be able to play the complete game, but the on-line gaming part will be gone unfortunately.

Enjoy!

Just a quick post to announce that all sites under evaria.com, including this blog, will be down for “maintenance” as of this afternoon.

WHY?

My brother is upgrading/replacing the drives (hard disks) which means I will get more storage space He estimates it’s going to take between 2-3 hours to copy all files on to the new drives if all goes well.

Fingers crossed…