Eric Eikrem’s Blog

In a recent article [se-1], the Swedish information technology news site IT24 identifies 4 interesting investment prospects in the ITC sector; Episerver, Fox Technologies, Nimsoft and Qliktech. They all have experienced fast growth, include valuable IP, and have a quite impressive list of clients. The 3 first companies have participation from the Nordic VC fund Northzone, while Qliktech’s most important investor is the Swedish fund Industrifonden.

• Episerver: Offers a range of content and community management products and services. It is highly profitable and have just reached 3000 customers. According to the company, the EPiServer CMS – is the world’s fastest growing commercial CMS platform. No wonder they are going public [en-1]. Third parties are continually adding modules and features [en-2].
• Fox Technologies: Delivers advanced access control, servers, applications and desktops, with centralised access controls management across the IT infrastructure.
• Nimsoft: Fast-growing supplier of unique solutions for the management and measurement of service levels, including levels in cloud computing.
• Qliktech: Business intelligence software with a wide range of applications for different sectors and company sizes. Impressive growth in revenue and number of clients. IPO-ready.

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We need news, proper news, the results of professional investigative reporting. We need it now more than ever. Why? Due to the climate change and local, regional environmental destruction and global demographics, we have extremely turbulent times ahead. In fact, they have already started.

In this situation, the much reported decline of quality journalism is – to say the least – lamentable [fr1, fr2]. The so-called citizen journalism is no replacement for professional investigative reporting. But unlike the latter, professional journalists need to get paid. Maintaining and even expanding investigative reporting is possible, even with reduced sales of advertising space, but only if news media comes to grip with the new reality in terms of production, presentation and distribution. Read more

I have 4 years experience as an entrepreneur. As my time as an entrepreneur has come to an end, at least for this time, it is natural to reflect on the things I’ve worked with in the context of entrepreneurship in general.

Some call it the entrepreneurial purgatory. Personally, I think that it has been too much fun to earn the designation “purgatorium”. Entrepreneurship does entail a relatively high stress level, and things change very much from one day to another, and sometimes from hour to hour. The best term is the ping-pong-life: work, good times and bad, opportunities and obstacles, and your mood, varies widely. In such a situation is very difficult to maintain focus, and to prioritize correctly is a big challenge. You are in a constant time squeeze and, quite often, what is urgent takes precedence over what is important. Another challenge in such a turbulent life is to see your own limitations, and to obtain expertise when needed.
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