Right now two Nordic companies have launched competitions for social entrepreneurs where the price is an investment in the winning idea(s)! That is in itself super-cool! But if you ask me I think one of these competitions is a joke…

The good news is that Nokia’s competition, the Growth Economy Venture Challenge, is super-inspiring and open for a world of ideas. Basically the only restrictions that Nokia are giving are that you need an idea that incorporates a super-simple mobile phone (duh…) and that the idea should enhance life for people in communities where the average daily income is less than $5. Other than that you can come up with ideas to treat illness and save lives, enhance business, educate, organize communities or whatever quality of life enhancement you can think of.

The price? A $1 000 000 investment in your idea!
(Requested stake in the idea is not stated.)

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The “bad news” then?
Well, it is not really bad; it is just really lame… Kinnevik’s competition, Playing for Change, is a social venture competition with 8 winners and that is really cool! All 8 will receive 1-3 years of personal income, access to Kinnevik’s network and business professionals and a desk at their social business incubator, etc. Nice!

But, here’s the lame part: You may only enter the competition with an idea that supports kids’ rights to play.

Is that lame? Yes, that is LAME!

Because that is restricting YOU, a possible future social entrepreneur, to start your career at a very low priority level in the world of social problems and needs. Let’s just say that we kept the restriction to kids and changed it to: “improve social conditions for children”. Below are some facts to consider:

• Today, and in fact any other day, 16 000 children die from hunger-related issues.
• Rotavirus and pneumonia is killing 9 000 children every day.
• Another 3 000 kids die of malaria today, tomorrow and the day after that…
• All in all a total of 25 000 children die every day as an effect of poor social conditions that we can solve with entrepreneurship and solidarity.

Don’t you think that those kids would rather live than die playing?

Here’s another fact to think about:

• 100+ million children do not have access to education.

If they could choose between the right to play and the right to learn, what do you think would be their choice?

It gets worse though… As I read through the competition’s proposition I find this statement:

“We are looking for you that have an idea to enhance the world for Swedish children and youth…” (translated by me)

“the world for Swedish children”??? On top of the lameness above Kinnevik wants you to call yourself a social entrepreneur and submit ideas to help children play in the world’s 15^th richest country (and no. 1 on Save the Children’s “Children’s Index Rank“). COME ON!?

Strangely enough I think that the description of social entrepreneurship on Playing for Change’s website is very striking and well thought through:

“A social entrepreneur is a person with innovative solutions to society’s most fundamental social problems. They are ambitious and persistent persons who address the most important and most critical social issues and find new ideas for radical social change.” (translated by me)

That is a great definition of the social entrepreneur even though I think it lacks some business focus and it also fails to include people that indirectly work for social change by creating tools for whole communities to do good (kind of what I do). Now, is Swedish kids’ access to play a “fundamental social problem” or one of “the most important and most critical social issues”? If your answer is YES I’d die to hear it!

Kinnevik, you should take a look at Nokia’s excellent initiative to inspire social ventures and really think through your strategy when you start schooling the Swedes in the art of social entrepreneurship (which I think in itself is GREAT). It is serious business and you have the power to set the level of that seriousness. Unfortunately, the level of social importance you have set for “Swedish Social Entrepreneurs” and their ideas, by making Playing for Change the biggest endorsement of social entrepreneurship in Sweden ever, is a joke…

Final note: I think that kids’ play as a TOOL for social entrepreneurs to carry out their missions is great! Around the globe children are educated, organized, inspired and probably treated for illnesses by incorporating play into their lives. Even in Sweden I think social ventures giving refugee kids or handicapped children etc. access to play would be cool. If play is used by social entrepreneurs around the world let it be AS MEANS to save lives, educate the uneducated or give hope to those that have none.

Nokia – #rules

Kinnevik – #fail (please try again!)

Greenhouse gas is not worth anything, it’s simply waste. But, as with any waste – once it piles up in tons and tons and tons it becomes a threat to the producers of the waste. And around the waste a market for waste management starts to grow.

Greenhouse gas, and CO2 in particular, is different from most other types of waste:
A: It can be turned into valuable material, wood in particular, in combination with other resources. And
B: It moves freely across borders, from nation to nation and even over continents.

While I and many with me believe that technology will actually prevail, and save us from burning up, the “CO2 Reactor” will not work for decades. We need to capture this gas now, and we need to use proven “technology” to do it. Well here’s some news: There is a great, working process called Photosynthesis that has been around for a couple of billion years, and that actually works!

To capture and store CO2 NOW all we have to do is to beef up the planets photosynthesis capacity, harvest the captured CO2 and keep it on the ground!

Capturing and storing CO2 is slowly becoming a new business opportunity for many third world countries. The social and economic effects are many and quite amazing:

• Get paid to plant a forest: The main thing to grow if you want to capture CO2 is trees. Forests are emerging, particularly in Africa, as pure CO2 capturing ventures. The execution cannot be digitalized or outsourced, it is done by the locals.
• Get shadow and water: The trees will provide shadow and the root systems will make the ground water level raise considerably. A forest landscape on the edge of the Sahara will lower the temperature at the surface with as much as 6 centigrade!
• Introduce forest agriculture: There is forestry, meaning growing a forest, and forest agriculture, meaning growing crops in the forest between the trees. Yes, with shadow and moist in the ground it is possible to grow wheat and other stuff within the forest – on places where agriculture was impossible before.
• Commercialize Biochar: Forestry and forest agriculture produce tons of biologic waste, containing tons of captured CO2 that naturally decompose back into CO2. There is a way, called biochar, of permanently keeping this CO2 out of the atmosphere for thousands of years, and it has been known for thousands of years. Why is it not exploited? – It could be a billion $ biz…
• And so much more: Forests hold the main natural recourses for medical production. Forests do NOT consume clean water, they PRODUCE clean water (anyone saying anything different is lying!). Forests are housing the richest animal life on the planet, providing us with ecosystems, in turn providing food, protein-sources, tourism, good TV, and much more.

We need to look seriously upon the possibility and opportunity to make the entire area around the equator between the north and the south polar circles into a green zone. I’m not kidding…

Yes! After a long long time, this ingenious idea has finally found its way to the world!

What is it? It is a way for people to compensate for the negative impact that their digital activities have on the environment.  It is simple: You use your computer to read this blog, that will consume electric power, in most cases generated by fossil fuels – emitting CO2 into the atmosphere.  You can compensate the emission simply by making sure that the same amount of carbon is sucked back down from the sky and kept on the earth’s surface. We, or our partners I should say, will do this for you by planting trees in areas of the earth where trees would never grow naturally.  Thus creating CO2 absorbing areas of the earth that would not be present without your compensation!

I got this idea one day when I looked at a GiverSign in my own email, thought about that our servers are all powered by wind and sun power, and realized that that part of my email was actually carbon free. Why not offer people to expand that to include their entire digital communication? Who would not like to send Carbon Free Email!?

You will also get an e-certificate that we created so that you can show everyone you know that your e-mail messages,  blog posts, and Facebook dwelling is CO2 neutral. And hopefully they will compensate their digital carbon footprint as well, and so the revolution begins… Click on the sign below to read more and sign up!

CO2Compensate.com – Carbon neutral computing for everyone!

I am very happy to announce a new GiverSign partner: Plan! Plan is today one of the world’s largest humanitarian aid organization. It started 1937 in Britain as a foster parent organization helping children that had lost their parents in the Spanish civil war. Today Plan is working in 66 countries all over the world and has expenditure of over $265M in many projects, providing help and a better future for millions of children.

We will start a campaign in Sweden with Plan and we hope to advance throughout the Plan International network soon.

http://www.plan-international.org/
http://www.plansverige.org/

Check it out:

For whatever it is worth – I wanna send my best wishes and thoughts to all struggling startup entrepreneurs out there. Remember to judge yourself based on your business and your execution. Valuations, cash-droughts, withdrawing VCs and deal-breakers (the bad kind). This is all bullshit and has nothing to do with you. Take as little shit as you can, but take all the money you can. Forget all the usual rules, and most importantly – don’t forget who you are. I might sound a little dramatic. But right now a lot of dreams are squashed and promises broken.

Friends; I’m not bitter nor in much trouble. I’m just a little sad. The people who take the biggest risks; building and developing our economy and wealth; are the first to be sacrificed and to loose everything in this madness. Right now finance-people hate startups. What are they thinking… ?

When I get out on the other side. I will be different. Better.

Love,
/Linus

If this sounds interesting, you can send Arnaud an e-mail for further information:
arnaud@asaasco.com

I have gone from being a super-naive entrepreneur to become an almost-as-super-naive entrepreneur AND CEO of a VC funded Internet startup with, for the time being,  the world’s greatest web-technology under its wing.

Internet World gave me a 12th place at their hot-list for 2008, next year I’m hoping to climb the list! Please?

I’ve also moved with my family to Gothenburg and moved my HQ to Gårdatorget 1. A bit painful but even more a fruitful activity.

And, I could tell you a million other ego-centric stuff. But frankly, who cares…

We are breeding a future biz-superstar, this guy is hot! 10% young, 10% naive (i.e. fearless), 10% know-how, 10% French, 10% Swedish, 50% drive. Add 100% cool. Check back in 2009 to read more about Arnaud and the rest of the growing team!

Thanks everyone who made 2008 a fantastic year!

Now – come 2009! Fuck the financial crisis, the world is changing and we are going to be change-makers more than ever. A cash-drought is just a lack of paper and guts, don’t listen to all that economy-BS. When the world experience a lack of good people and opportunities then I will listen. But now!? No way! There are literally millions of opps out there, millions of talented people and new ways to blend the two like the world has never seen before.

Have no fear, 2009 will be fenomenal! Happy New Year!

Now…

Fasten Your Seat Belts – We Gonna Kick Ass!

You love to make things simple (not necessarily easy) and you have a passion for making web based services/sites that ANYONE can understand and use. You know your way around xhtml, css and java, you have a good eye conceptually as well as visually and you master the Adobe CS suite. Using Flash because it’s Flash is NOT in it self a good enough reason for you, you look for the right tools depending on what you must achieve. You may or may not be a programmer, but setting up a few PHP functions is not a problem for you. You pay great attention to details but also understands that nothing digital is perfect.

You are an entrepreneurial spirit and ready to set up your own operation within the company, your goal is to become a partner with a key position in the company as soon as possible. You will be working with some of the world’s largest, most important, fastest growing viral advocacy and fundraising campaigns. You will also be working with some of the smallest nonprofit organizations and to you they are of course just as important as the big ones. Still, you know how to prioritize when things heat up…

I don’t care about your background, education or work experience. You need to prove to me that you are the right person for the job, I don’t care how you do it. Office is located in Gothenburg. Good luck!

linus@asaasco.com

www.giversign.com

Yeah right… I’m so fed up with all the BS of this global crisis… Let me tell you a couple of things -strait from the heart of a naive entrepreneur like myself:

The Money:
There is just as much cash money in the world today as one year ago, so it can’t really be about cash?

The Politics:
Same conflicts, same states, same laws, taxes and alliances as a year ago, basically. Can’t really be about politics either?

Natural Resources:
Same good old oil BS as always, the rock is still solid, the forests are still growing, the wind is blowing and the water is flowing. No, can’t be about natural resources.

People:
People work just as hard as they did a year ago, and in addition a new generation of bright and strong ‘kids’ born in the 80s bring new energy to the global workforce. Ok, it’s not a worker-crisis.

Technology:
The Internet is still there (apparently) and still growing, same thing with the mobile coverage and services. Technology is in fact getting better and better all the time.

Consumers:
No, they have not left the face of the earth.

What are we missing!? I’m not sure, everything I need to do my thing and make my vision come true and change real, it’s all there like it was a year ago. Speaking of vision – Remember that financials; that’s just something (pretty annoying) you need to reach your goals. Vision has nothing to do with how big a loan the bank is willing to give you or how much the VC is willing to pay for a stake in your company. Vision may be about money, sure, but if it’s about credit then you have a big problem…

My solution:
Ban credit. Play the game with cash. Finance your ventures with cash. Sure, that may be in the form of credit. But stay far away from credits based on credit, and credits based on credits based on credit and… If you use up money and there’s risk involved then make sure that you don’t destroy the world around you if all goes wrong. IT IS THAT FUCKING SIMPLE! It’s the rule of responsible spending and economics whether you risk a million or a billion.

I don’t know where I’m going with this so don’t take it too serious. I’m just annoyed and I don’t care much about money really. My business is progress and change. Much love.

Nothing has changed, all the molecules are there, right? Yet everything has changed…