pathy

uspto.gov doesn't seem to allow linking directly to trademark filing but search for Bolt and the first two results appear to be from Bolt.co.

One was filed in the 22nd and the other on the 23rd July 2014. Seems like something they should have done earlier but I do feel for them none the less, potentially going up against FB's legal team seems less than fun.

>"IC 009. US 021 023 026 036 038. G & S: Computer application software for mobile phones, namely, software for use in text, voice and video communication between users. FIRST USE: 20131014. FIRST USE IN COMMERCE: 20131014"

>The first example is Vattenfall vs. Germany. The former, an energy provider, sued and won against the latter, for the decision to phase out nuclear energy.

Vattenfall suing the German state makes sense considering the business impact the change had. Add to that, Vattenfall is wholly owned by the Swedish state so the TTIP should have no impact what so ever on their dealings.

Of course. It does vary on a country to country basis. I believe most countries consider BTC an asset rather than a currency, thus incurring the capital gains tax.

Sweden for example does, and I believe Norway as well. Funny that, Scandinavian countries usually have similar legislation. ( http://blog.btcx.se/bitcoin-nytt/dags-att-deklarera-bitcoin-... )

For 2), surely you would have to pay capital gains tax on the increase in value. To be fully compliant with the law, it may be hard to enforce in reality.

Thanks for sharing! Interesting and potentially useful for a fair number of people.

MP just decided to go into the election with a 35 hour work day proposal. I also believe V and F! are in support of a work hour reduction to varying degrees.

So there is definitely a push to reduce the work day (Though possibly not to 6 hours).

Or simply stop adaptation on a larger scale.

I stayed there when I was in Hong Kong a few years back. Interesting place. I have a video of the back alley entrance to our hostel somewhere...

A weird place.

This is certainly true. Saving the owner of a small-ish business several hours over the course of the year is valuable, and probably an easier sell than selling the same to a large state-run school.

It doesn't have to be that an extreme, making the employee(s) currently responsible for the cards redundant, but it would allow them to do more productive tasks. That said, those productive tasks may not be as relaxing and mindless as creating those cards in Photoshop.

Point still stands though.

You are probably pitching your product to the wrong audience.

Your customer is not the one actually making the cards, rather their boss. Making the cards only costs the employees time, something they don't mind wasting for the most part. For the manager or owner it directly costs money, time wasted on making cards costs the employer money in the form of wages. They are also the one with the purchasing power in an organization like a school.

Creating a more efficient organization is generally speaking not part of the scope of someone making ID cards, but it certainly is for their employers or managers.

Exactly this.

Reinventing the wheel in this case is really risky. Screwing up accounting is a sure fire way to get into trouble. Don't take unnecessary risks when you don't have to.

For those interested, the financials of Mojang and Notch Development (IP License owner) are available for 2012 and will probably be out for 2013 reasonably soon.

http://www.allabolag.se/5567597686/Notch_Development_AB

http://www.allabolag.se/5568192388/Mojang_AB

Mind you, the complete annual reports cost money, just under $5 each.

>Still, the amount of information you miss can be staggering - not just from decreased deliberate communication, but from not getting ambient information about your team members knowledge.

Which is actually one of the positive points of Open office spaces. Despite many engineers disliking them, they do force employees to communicate more.

There are of course other negative things about open office spaces but that is a big win.

You certainly have a point. Remote work doesn't have to have bad communication but there are barriers to communicating and if the organization is not set up to properly handle the barriers it can cause issues.

Outsourcing to a different country in a different time zone with entirely different management styles is asking for communication trouble.

A company built on remote work from the start seems to be more likely to succeed with remote work than one who has adopted it kind of ad hoc.

Luckily BBC only have to care about British citizens. I don't know how they do mobile streaming but it clearly works on at least some mobile devices. Native app for that? I only really use iPlayer from a computer.

> I don't bother to install Flash on my desktop, I just use Chrome when I need it.

Most people don't know, care or understand what flash is. They want something that works and don't really care if it isn't as secure as something else or use slightly more resources. HN is not really representative for the public at large.

I was more looking for a realistic alternative choice for BBC.

BitTorrent isn't.

Fair points. Flash is moderately inefficient and a vector for viruses. But it runs on practically all computers out there and works on older computers that doesn't have HTMl5 supported browsers. Hopefully this segment is shrinking but it still exists.

We don't know how their development cycle looks or their backend. There is probably a reason they chose not to do HTMl5 at this moment. It will probably come in due time. Worth noting is that Youtube mostly remains on Flash, though they do have HTML5 beta.

HTML5 is still quite a new technology while Flash is well established, despite its flaws.

What would you it rather use? HTML5? Silverlight?

What is wrong with using an establish platform like Flash? iPlayer works, and works well. I happy to see BBC continuing to improve.

I don't see anything close to resembling epic fail with iPlayer.

Exactly!

I was doing research at a large European bank that has a lot of development outsourced. The project management primarily located at their HQ in Europe while the development is mostly in India.

They have had to resort to moving over a fair few people from India to their HQ as the communication just doesn't work as well otherwise. There is simply no replacing face-to-face communication.

The Communication has the be incredibly specific when outsourcing, not to mention the time difference which carries another set of issues. Both contribute to communication issues, at which point it may simply be better to do it locally, or at least move contractors over from outsourcing location to your HQ.

Remote work is popular right now but the value of just being able to walk over to a colleague to discuss a problem should not be underestimated.

> I view 3 weeks without work as a feature, not as a problem.

3 weeks without work can mean real cash issues, especially for those who are just starting out in freelancing. It may be nice to have a three week break but let's be honest, most would be terrified and be frantically hunting for work.

Hardly a feature.

>But I believe that a freelance should always keep at least six months of living expenses worth of funds in liquid assets.

But if you have a six month emergency fund, then it may be a feature I guess ;). Many do not though.

You can always check out the monthly STHLM Tech Meetup (#STHLMTECH on Twitter for conversations).

I heard that a lot of startups at hanging out at SUP46 (http://sup46.com/) these days. They got some cool startups there right now and seem friendly enough. You can also check out http://swedishstartupspace.com/. They usually cover Stockholm based startups.

I saw some map of Stockholm startups somewhere but cannot for my life remember where. Should be able to Google for it.

Edit: Next STHLM Tech Meetup is on the 17th Feb. There was one earlier this week, which I unfortunately was unable to attend. http://www.meetup.com/STHLM-Tech-Meetup/events/162741412/

Sounds like a holiday would do you good. No use becoming burnt out from not taking holidays.

Luckily IT companies can often manage a few days without you.

Best of luck with the startup and do enjoy vacations, or at least long weekends, from time to time.

You have a right to take it during that summer period. You don't have to but your employer are not required to grant you four weeks of uninterrupted vacation during say November.

Many Swedes have summer houses that they go to during the summer when the kids are on summer break from school. There is also a so called "Industrial Vacation" during July, where many companies at least partially close for a month, this is especially true for manufacturing.

A Swedish perspective:

By law you are granted 25 days vacation per year, assuming you have worked enough to "earn them", generally you get 12.5-13.x% extra salary per day worked that goes towards your vacation.

The law also says that you have a right to 4 weeks uninterrupted vacation during the June, July and August. At least two months before the (requested) vacation you must get a definitive decision. The employers are not allowed, by law, to change their mind about granted vacation time.

I believe I saw a study that recommended shorter, more frequent, vacations as the best way to recover from mental fatigue but I assume that there is a lot of opposing opinions on that matter.

No, you are making your opinion seem far worse by not even bothering to explain your reasoning.

You make it sound like you would be a victim. HN may be biased in it's views by and large but if you don't even try to explain yourself, you give the impression that you are even more ignorant of others views than the ~100% are of yours.

What is your core competency? A self-hosted wordpress does take time to maintain, security updates and what not.

If I were to host a company blog (With no particular privacy concerns) I would probably use something like WPEngine.com. The cost per month is relatively small and if your company saves just an hour or two per month on maintenance, it is probably worth it.

Tumblr/wp.com is of course an alternative but it depends if you feel that they provide enough customizability for your needs.

Wordpress.com, for example, does not allow Google Analytics last I checked, and that was a big no no for me.

Edit: You can use Jekyll, octopress and so forth like others have suggested. BUT who are going to be writing/using the blog? Less technical users may not find those easy to use. The upside of both WP and tumblr is that they are easy to use for the average user.

I believe credit card fraudsters often test the cards with small charges in order to determine if the cards actually work before going on a spending spree.

Such small transactions are quite suspicious from the point of view of the credit card company.

Agreed!

In Stockholm you can pay $6 for a cup of coffee alone. Ok maybe not cup of black coffee but $6 for a cup of cappuccino is no problem.

Storing knowledge is a bit tricky. For a starter you have to consider the types of knowledge. Most commonly you talk about tacit[0] and explicit[1] knowledge.

Tacit knowledge is hard to communicate by writing or even verbally. Rather it is mostly transferred via learning by doing. In a software scenario tacit knowledge would probably be the code base. The style, naming conventions and what not of the code is likely to be relatively unique and it is hard to communicate via a document, rather the employees has to get a feel for the code, use and modify it. It takes time and you probably should have some kind of coaching set up for new employees coming in, especially if your company is specialized or uses something unusual.

You should also keep in mind that certain employees may possess unique knowledge and considering the relatively high employee turnover you should make sure that your processes don't fall apart if an employee leaves the company. Don't let people have their own pet projects that no one else knows anything about, especially if those projects are mission critical.

Explicit knowledge is easier to document and you can use stuff like Wikis or Confluence. Explicit knowledge is basically everything you can easily communicate via documents or verbally. So guidelines, processes and such.

If you got proprietary information or personal information of EU citizens you may want to consider a locally hosted solution, especially if you are located outside USA (avoid Google etc). I've used Wikis in the past but also had solutions like word documents with processes.

It does depend on your needs, simple word documents with processes may be enough. I know huge companies like Shell has had moderate success with a wiki solution[2]. I should have slides from a knowledge manager Shell presentation somewhere, will have a look around.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explicit_knowledge

[2]: http://www.ikmagazine.com/xq/asp/txtSearch.Intranet/exactphr... (Old but may be relevant).