|
|
Are you going to drop the bomb or not? |
September 20, 2011 |
As most of you are probably already aware that I am currently limited under competitive restrictions after the sale of my last venture Servage in 2007.
Being an entrepreneur sitting on my hands has not been an option for me so I have been working quietly on a project for the last couple of years (about to go live soon). While I really wanted to stay in the Internet space this was not a viable option due to my competitive restrictions.
So what am I up to and why the headline?
 Well, the project is a fully automated quantitative trading system. Basically the system is looking to exploit supply and demand disparities in derivatives while applying strict risk management. This translates into taking the other side of thousands of financial transactions every day and provide liquidity in the marketplace.
Being in the Euro area the project is in danger getting impacted by political fights against the capitalist principles that is the cornerstone of successful societies. Currently the main issue is the proposed tax on financial transactions – even a small tax would force me to start the project outside Europe.
This particular system is not yet live but let me provide an example of simulated trading from last week (ES liquidity providing) to illustrate the problem:
Average ES December 2011 contract value for the day: $59,750
Total contracts traded by system: 2,500
Turnover for the day: $149,375,000
Revenue for the day (excluding employee costs etc.): $35,108
Exchange fees etc.: $5,025
With a transaction tax of just 0.10% the daily tax burden would be $149,375/day making the system hugely unprofitable forcing me and other quantitative trading companies abroad. Such taxes would decrease employment and total tax revenues in the long run - just look at the Tobin tax in Sweden during the 1980s.
Please bear in mind that I am not arguing against taxes, they should just be applies on profits (like now) and not turnover. Under current rules the company and its future employees would pay at least $2.5 million annual in taxes which is fair.
So, Merkel before you drop the bomb please note: It's better to get a fair share of a large pie, that everything of a non-existing one!
|
What will be next? |
August 12, 2009 |
As many of you might know I started a small company six years back named Servage and what a ride it has been since! Servage has grown to become a major hosting provider growing at an amazing pace.
Back in May 2007 a Swedish telecommunication approached to take over the company convincing me that it would be a gain for Servage to become a part of their company and I sold Servage.
Now a couple of years later I feel that it is time for me to pursue new challenges and have decided to resign as CEO of Servage Hosting. It has been no easy decision to make as I enjoy working with my colleagues - and I will indeed be missing the fun times we have had!
What will be next?
|
New Office = New Inspiration |
April 25, 2008 |
Skilled employees are one of our most valuable assets therefore our German team
has moved to a new wonderful office in a newly renovated historic building. With
both city and bay views it is a very inspiring location to work from.

Office Building at Night

System Administrator / Development Area
|
Rewarding Loyalty |
January 8, 2008 |
I saw something the other from
a fairly large webhosting company that astounded me and might even insult a fair amount
of their customers.
What they did was to offer large free upgrades available to new customers only! Basically
new customers got three times as more storage than older more loyal customers - for
the exact same price!
While I understand that there are pulling a promotional I still do not find it
good from a customer standpoint when loyal customers finances upgrades for new
customers only. It simply violates my principles for good business.
In my opinion the entire telecom industry should be looking more towards how good
old offline companies are building value for their customers. The most successful
companies are building relationships with customers based on trust and my providing
loyal customers with the best deals.
At Servage we want to follow the good "old-fashioned" business model that a lot of
other online companies do not seem to believe in. Therefore we upgrade accounts of
all current customers a little bit every day so that loyal customers always get the
absolutely best deal - after all they are the key to our success and generate most
of our revenue.
|
Happy New Year! |
December 23, 2007 |
It has been a really busy
and successful year at Servage Hosting with higher growth than I ever dared to imagine!
The success has been made possible by our team of extremely committed employees who
really walked those extra miles for our customers.
So what did happen?
Well most importantly our customers kept telling the world about our services!
Customer referrals have always been our main source of new customers so we can
thank our customer for our success - and we never forget that. This motivates
all members of the Servage team members to keep doing amazing things so that
we continue being the best hosting provider around.
"B䳴a m?ga anslutningar" - say what!?
Yes guess it, Servage is expanding with localized versions. This year we
started offering the world a Swedish version (what to see something funny:
servage.se) and we will expand in multiple new countries during 2008. Our
goal is to provide services in as many languages and markets as possible
to ensure our international customers with an even better service.
We eat fibers for breakfast
In ten years we will look back at 2007 as the year of the big updates.
With three new gigabit connections and hundreds of new servers our
administrators (myself included) spend countless hours installing
new equipment. This is one of our favourite things to do as it is
very satisfying to scale our system to the benefit of our customers.
Our systems are now more redundant than ever before but of cause it
can get even better - and we already have a plan!
At last I would like to take this opportunity to wish every one of our
customers and employees a merry Christmas (for those of you celebrating)
and a happy new year!
|
Welcome: Open Source Networking |
November 11, 2007 |
Is open source a true
alternative old fashioned routing solution when security, stability, scalability
and uptime are required to be perfect? Yes, defiantly we turned off our last
Cisco router a long time ago!
Our company has set a goal to only use open source products before the end of 2008. At
this time all systems must been shifted over to open source based systems
(except for some Office and accounting applications). Our movement towards an
open routing platform was an important step to achieve this goal.
We gave our self the almost impossible task to get fairly common server hardware
to perform the same tasks as traditional expensive commercial routers. We were
actually fairly skeptical when testing this but excellent results started
showing almost instantly!
How we implemented the New Routers
We modified the open source systems a bit (which is easy to do as they are ?
well ? Open Source) and tested them systems extensively for a period of time. As
the new system was determined stable it was taken into the production
environment but still with the old Cisco system as failover (just in case).
After a few months of testing Servage shifted all routers to the new setup and
have not experienced anything change but improved network performance and
stability
As you probably already know a hosting company like Servage has a huge high end
network using eBGP, iBGP and OSPF routing multiple gigabit of Internet traffic.
Open Source routing works great for us ? chances are that it could benefit your
network also!
|