Mike Butcher

I wandered back to the hotel, through Helsinki’s dark, icy streets. Past the brutish contrasts of the heavy, carved stone of Central Station, looking like a set piece from a Gothic Batman movie, and the blinking illuminated signs on the side of the angular glass office buildings.

After packing the essentials into a back-pack I flicked robotically through the TV channels, from CNN to the Russian variety show and the incomprehensible Italian chat show. Ernest Finns peered through the screen, while Arabic soap operas played out their coquetish attempts at intrigue.

An early morning wake-up call had me up and out in 20 minutes and sailing through the still-dark street in a taxi to the ferry. By the time I’d bought my ticket and boarded the freey with the other Finnish and Estonian day-trippers, all wrapped up tight against the freezing elements, the sun was coming up over the port. The container ships and oil tankers looked almost warm, bathed in the morning light.

We set off for Tallinn. Inside, the ferry was a mix of 1970s cafeteria kitsch and mid-80s discotheque. With the obligatory “nautical” themed nets and ropes.

But the early morning passengers weren’t allowed to rest their heads for the four hour journey. For – oh joy – on came the ships band (three middle aged men, a synth, a drum machine and a twangy guitar) to play an “upbeat” mix of Beatles and Dire Straits. “Here gum johnny, he do the valk off life, oh yeah, whoo hoo.”

Coming into a modern looking ferry terminal four hours later, I stepped outside to see two symbols of Tallin’s past and future. One was the medieval turrets of the old town. The other was a forest of cranes hanging over skyscrapers to the city’s south.

Steve Bowbrick, former co-founder of Webmedia, the seminal web agency of mid- 90s Internet-crazed London, will no doubt be delighted to learn that there is now a “Webmedia” in Estonia, according to the New York Times. I guess it’s no coincidence that the new tech boom has moved over to former Soviet Union countries and emerging economies like India. Webmedia London, RIP. Webmedia Estonia, may you live long and prosper…

It’s been a long day of interviews sand I’ve got an appointment with some ZZZs. However, suffice it to say that after meeting with a bunch of mobile firms here in Helsinki today, I’m going to say one word: Communities. Ok, so it doesn’t sound that ground breaking, but I guess the first web page looked pretty dull too. (In fact when the first site I was ever involved in building – back in 1994 in fact – needed a button, we produced a huge graphic of a big red button and plonked it on the page. We thought THAT was cutting edge). But I digress. Put simply, mobile communities and community functions are going to be at the core of every serious media owner, every operator (at least the ones that survive the shift to IP-based networks) and every handset maker on the planet. The digital media world is leaving the realm of hard-ware, hard-portals and hard-media and moving into the fluid world of soft-ware and soft-networks. It’s the new religion, baby.

I have been trying to catch up with blogging, but with a hectic schedule, limited access to decent Wi-Fi (make that decent and affordable Wi-Fi), not to mention sub-zero temperatures – it’s getting tricky. Suffice it to say I’ve met a lot of people on the way so far, including Prof. Chip MacGuire (who told me why mobile operators are dead meat), Stina from Cypak (which will probably one day be a household name), Elin from Doberman, the fabulous digital agency, Henrik form Docteq, Gustav from Kenetworks, and a whole bunch of others. Now I’m in Helsinki (meeting amazing people like Ulla and Jyri) it’s all starting again. I look forward to getting back to London where I can get it all down on screen (as opposed to paper!). For now, probably the best way to track this trip is my Flickr blog (see right), where pictures speak a thousand words – and at least they appear faster than I can type!

Meeting Cecilia Stegö Chilò of the Timbro thinktank was an experience. A former journalist, she is a passionate believer in the future of Sweden as a liberalised economy. The problem, she says, is that in a globalised world, the Nordic “social model” of high taxation, expensive public services won’t work, and nor will it create the jobs Sweden’s young people will need in the next few years.

She is also the author of a book about how Sweden became the nation it is: “The Shift of Systems: a 19th century story”, written at the beginning of 1990s. It electrified the political world. However, she says, Sweden’s apparent dynamism is masked by a stultifying public sector which is dragging down innovation and driving people abroad to more dynamic and faster health services, among others.

For instance, there is the recent incident of a woman who went to Germany for a knee operation, who later said ” I didn’t realise how good it was in other countries. I could have lived without the TV set and nice nurses at home if I could just get the operation faster.”

And while Stockholm thrives, the north of the country is effectively “dead.” It looks like Sweden is in for a long and firey public debate about it’s future direction.

One person I spoke here to estimated there are now 5,000 daily Swedish blogs, although it’s in online communities that Swedes have largely collected, somewhat reflecting the left-leaning community spirit of the culture which grew out of its 60s socialist roots.

Ericsson is gaining ground on Nokia amongst the Swedes, who often shunned the rather unsexy phones produced by their home-grown firm in favour of Finalnd’s finest. This is in no small part down to the successs of the Walkman phone, which Swedes now enjoy brandishing.

But in terms of so-called “Web 2.0″ applications, Sweden has yet to produce, as Henrik calls it, the “”Swedish LastFM”. Ah well, at least there’s still time.

But the employment market for Swedish IT stafff appears to be once again on the rise. It looks like 2005 was a real tipping point in Swedish adoption of new technology.

One thing that is HUGE in Sweden and Scandinavia generally, is online gambling. Swedes cannot, put simply, get enough of it, and spend on average 5,000 Krona a year per person on chance gaming.

Of course, the “digital divide” between the IT haves and have-nots exists, as it does elsewhere. But a government scheme allowing a tax subsidy to buy a PC for those on benefits has served the have-nots pretty well.

Taxes and online banking are also now almost totally online, and pretty much all governmental services are going that way, including digital signatures for transactions.

Stockholm trip Part 2, Jan 23: I met and interviewed the two founders of Sweden’s biggest online auction, Tradera.com.


Although it’s an easy pitch to call them an eBay copy, in fact these like-able young entrepreneurs started and stuck with the auction business right the way through massive competitions from outside players like eBay and QXL, and the dotcom nuclear winter of 2001-2003. They have emerged with 90% of the Swedish auctions market. In other words they out-ebay’d ebay.

Now, instead of having to sell the contents of their attic to only three people in the local hamlet, Swedes can sell to all 9 million of their countrymen online. In fact, for many, snapping up items in the newspaper classifieds and then wacking them into Tradera.com has become a lucrative second or even first new income stream. Vintage clothing is now the largest category on site, as Swedes try top up their heavily taxed incomes through auctions.

His partner Daniel says: “Right we’re in a transition phase where the Internet population is maturing. It’s going from a behaviour which is to just read, to one where people search and then start to act online.”

Some 50-60,000 items are listed every day – 10 times as much as the biggest classified sites.

As co-direct Jonas Nordlander says, their success is partly down to the weather: “It’s COLD to stand outside and do a yard sale in Sweden!”

At some point there’ll be a more detailed report on my findings in Scandinavia, but for now, here’s a smattering of some of the people I’ve been talking to and the information I’ve gathered on the ground in Stockholm, Helsinki and Tallin (Estonia).

My ‘Scandinavian Odyssey’ began with a dry sandwich aboard a British Airways flight From London into Stockholm’s super-futuristic Arlanda airport. Sitting next to me were a Swedish couple who’d been celebrating “his” 40th birthday. They looked like pretty dull people, rather plainly dressed, at least up until the point when they ordered a couple of whiskies and a half bottle of wine each to quaff on the trip.

A flight delay meant arriving in Stockholm in the dark. But my taxi pulled me up right outside the Non Solo bar cafe where I met A-List Swedish blogger Henrik Torstensson (below) of Torstensson.com.

Henrik turned out to be an affable young man in his mid 20s with an encyclopedic knowledge of the Swedish technology and internet business. Later I was to hear from other sources that he was probably the most well connected blogger in the sector.

Getting a heads-up on the scene here is deceptive. In some respects its very similar to the UK. People are all using mobile and sites, as you’d expect in any educated, developed western economy. But things we take for granted, like the ubiquity of the iPod, are less obvious. So, for instance, “Jens of Sweden” was a guy who brought out MP3 players before the iPod was even around – hence the iPod does not have the stranglehold on the market as elsewhere (although it is gaining ground).

Also, online networking amongst teenagers is a full-blown phenomenon. Where they may be MSNing eachother after school in the UK, in Sweden they are doing that, plus asking their parents for a 10Krona sofa for their Habbo Hotel room, and building shrines to friends killed in the Boxing Day Tsunami over at LunarStorm.com. In fact the latter, which recently launched in the UK, is a massive succes story here. Some estimates say nine out of ten Swedish teenagers are registered on the site. I’d been told about this by the UK’s Andrew Gerrard over at D-Marketing in December, but until I came here I didn’t realise just how big it was.

Henrik also talked about how online publishers have done quite well here given that truly local content has to be produced in Swedish. Hence media mainstream players like the Aftonbladet newspaper have got into areas such as blogging quite early compared to, say, the Daily Telegraph. But altoutgh the classified advertising market is doing well online, it’s in the realm of online auctions where Swedish culture is really changing… (see Part 2 for more, out soon)…

I’m in Stockholm this week (till Friday) researching tech, media and mobile companies here for the The Guardian and New Media Age magazine, among others. Email me if you fall into that category and want to meet up. Likewise if you are in Helsinki – where I’ll be from Friday to Tuesday, or Tallinn (Estonia) on Wednesday… I’ve already had a great meeting tonight with Henrik Torstensson of Torstensson.com.

A lot of the discussion about the so-called new wave of “Web 2.0″ has centred around technology. But what effect is this new era going to have on marketing?

“Web 2.0″ as a phrase first appeared in the title of an O’Reilly conference in 2004. It was obviously boosterish, and took advanatge of the new wave of web companies doing strange new things with RSS and the like. Web 2.0 referred to using the Web as a “platform” instead of just as a loose conglomeration of interlinked sites.

“2.0″ also played to our hankering after the old days of the boom. If this was Web 2.0, weren’t the bad days over and a new boom yet to come?

It seemed so.

The last 18 months have been extremely interesting for any Web business follower.

Last year Web 2.0 started to mean less about technology and more about online democracy, “citizen journalism”, and “user generated content”. In other words, the technology was less important than the communities of people which Web 2.0 sites were starting to bring together.

Hence, we now have situations where technology firms are not acquired so much for their software as for the communities they have managed to attract to their sexy new application. See Flickr.com for starters. Or Rupert Murdoch paying $580 million for Myspace.

And acquiring was clearly back on the agenda. Web 2.0 in 2004 had been quite geeky. The following conference – by all accounts – was full of VCs.

Of course, there is no real bubble. There is no IPO bubble market these days. What investors are looking for is actually businesses, which is encouraging.

But I digress.

It’s communities which are the new feature here. Now, when I want to buy something, I don’t just buy the product, I research what other people have to say about it. If I find one on ebay, again, I don’t jus buy it, I see what everyone had to say about the seller first.

In very large part I ignore all “spin”. I avoid adverts, I look for trusted sources, I hunt down the smart view, the community of souls looking out for my interests, and I after theirs.

This new world of reputation and trust – powered by the Web 2.0 of social software – has the potential to have far a reaching impact on the worlds of media and marketing. That is pretty obvious.

What is less obvious is what these sectors do about it. Because from where I’m sitting, 2006 is going to be the year when traditional marketing really does start to roll over and die.

From here on, the only thing preventing someone from Googling absolutely everything before they buy it, use it or even east it, is having a decent phone on which to display the results.

The more the purchase of a product of service is influenced by marketing, the greater the impetus there is on us to checkout of what we are presented with matches reality.

Assuming most people check the home or work PC instead for now, and that the perfect Google phone turns up soon, that means it is going to be harder and harder to “spin” products and services to the average punter.

At this point of course I turn around and prove myself wrong. Who is going to be Googling a perfume? Well, perhaps not. But if, when Googling or Yahooing or MSNing, you find that it’s made of mashed-up Chinese children, or is no longer worn by Nicole Kidman afterall, the marketing sheen starts to evaporate.

The average punter is getting connected. Really connected. And the combination of “Web 2.0″ – using the Web as a platform for new and amazing applications, along with full-blown self-organising, self-policing communities (Wikipedia, Ebay, even Gawker is a communy of comment posters) looks like creating a perfect pincer-movement on marketing and related activities like PR.

Until marketing can come up with a response to this perfect storm – and please don’t say “Search Engine Optimization” or I’ll hunt you down and slit your throat – the only way, I’m afraid, is down.