Jay-Z has decided to offer Spotify and itunes some competition!

Music streaming service Spotify has been key to revolutionizing a music industry where labels and artists for a long while were plagued by piracy (MP3s anyone?). It’s recipe has been fairly simple; offer people a relatively cheap, legal, way of consuming all the music they need. It’s a win-win situation right? The consumer gets his or her needs fulfilled and the music labels gets a fair pay for their offering.

The win for the record industry doesn’t seem satisfactory however, why Jay-Z in colaboration has decided to start a competing service with a seemingly slightly higher price point (starting at $9.99/mo). Time will tell how they succeed, in the meantime have a look at what Tidal is about here.

It’s that time of the month: Exam time!

Our exam in Strategy is coming up this afternoon and that only means one thing for me; maximum exposure to my course material! 🙂

I don’t dare to say that i have good feelings about this one as i don’t want to jinx the bejesus out of my chances for a great grade, but i feel at some sort of ease. Here’s hoping for the right questions!

It’s that time of the year – F1 Premiere!

Had to set the alarm this morning to get into the 2015 F1 action from Australia. Been looking forward to this!

Forza Kimi!

When you realize that you’ve arrived 2hrs too early…

…there’s nothing else to do than crack the coffee and get to it!

Had an outdated schedule in my phone calendar which allowed me to get to school 2hrs before lecture. Yeesssshhh. Anyways; i might aswell read up on todays lecture material.

Turns out i’ll be going to Montréal this fall!

So at long last the time has come start preparing for the exchange semester this coming fall! I’ve spent a good amount of time until very recently on researching and ranking schools and courses, but finally the application process has come and gone and i can now say that i’ll be going to HEC Montreal in Canada (duh) in the fall! Yay! Signed the papers and everything today 🙂

I ranked three U.S Universities higher than HEC, but turns out at two of them won’t accept any incoming exchange students from our school next semester, and the last one…well, someone else apparently had a tad higher grades than me (just a tad! 😉 and got the spot instead.

Anyways; i’m very happy about going to HEC and also to experience Montreal and Canada, as i’ve previously never been there before. To this point i’ve certainly only heard good things about the country, and the school.

Now it’s time to start refining my very limited knowledge in French, since Quebec where Montréal is located is a French Canadian province. Thankfully the courses i plan to take are all taught in English though, anything else would probably have been problematic at this point 😉

In short: This has been a great day, and the onset of spring like days here in the south of Sweden right now makes any piece of good news even better!

When will Tesla become a mass-market car maker?

The buzz (no pun intended) surrounding the innovative car maker Tesla Motors is in no short supply. Oil might be at an all time low but the popularity of Elon Musk’s electric brain child seem to be all but falling. But the grand question ladies and gentlemen – is when Tesla will become a brand for the masses and start making profits like such. Tesla Motors current sales are a fraction of those of traditional car makers such as GM or Ford, and with massive overhead in for example R&D they really need to start ramping up their sales to reach profitability.

But with a sticker price at roughly $100 000 will the current Model S ever be a car for the masses? I personally doubt it, they need to have a significantly cheaper everyday car in their line-up, government subsidies for green vehicles not-withstanding.

There’s more about this subject over at Bloomberg.

 

Speed and simplicity – Does strategy need to be any harder than that?

Co-founder and chairman of LinkedIn Reid Hoffman has two basic guidelines when it comes to strategic decision making; It has to go fast and it needs to be simple. For someone like me who’s currently studying Strategy this idea is kind of refreshing. I understand that strategy never is fully planned as per Porter nor fully emergent as per Mintzberg but rather falls somewhere between the two. In any case the theoretical side of it all sometimes seems overwhelming in practice. So i can imagine that in certain cases having the kind of rules of thumb that Hoffman describes can be very useful.

Read the full HBR article here.