Unless you’re a fortune-teller, long-term business planning is a fantasy. There are just too many factors that are out of your hands: market conditions, competitors, customers, the economy, etc. Writing a plan makes you feel in control of things you can’t actually control.

Why don’t we just call plans what they really are: guesses. Start referring to your business plans as business guesses, your financial plans as financial guesses, and your strategic plans as strategic guesses. Now you can stop worrying about them as much. They just aren’t worth the stress.

So true. Excerpt from the excellent book Rework, by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson from 37signals, makers of Basecamp and Highrise among other applications. You should read it.

Apple** sold 2.8%** of all mobile handsets worldwide, but rakes in a whopping 39% of the profits.

Let me say that one more time. Sold 2.8% of the market, gets 39% of the profits. And this includes all phones worldwide, not just smartphones. Apple sold 17 million handsets during the first half of 2010. Nokia, LG and Samsung, combined, sold 400 million. Their profits, again, combined, are lower than Apple’s.

Look at the graph below to get a better picture at how this is split up:

Via The Mac Observer.

This is a fantastic story about how everyone involved in a viral story on the social web can benefit from it.

Yesterday, I watched a short 6-minute-long TED talk from Margaret Stewart, YouTube’s head of user experience, where she talked about how YouTube thinks about copyright.

The talk shows how a viral YouTube video called JK Wedding Entrance Dance (which is excellent btw! It always makes me smile.) generated massive new revenue for Sony Music and Chris Brown. The creators of the video also received enormous attention and collected 26 000 dollars to help fight domestic violence. The huge youtube-hit was also parodied in an episode of NBC’s The Office.

This truly is a great example of how the creators, the content owner, the artist and the general public (from the joy and money for fighting domestic violence) can all benefit, together, from the same video.

Have you ever wondered when people break up? Look at the graph below.

I watched a TED talk the other day from David McCandless called “The beauty of data visualizations“. It was quite amazing and included lots of different datasets. One of them was about Facebook and breakups. David and his team scanned over 10 000 status-updates and set out to learn more about when people broke up. This is what they learned:

• A big peak right before Spring Break
• Most breakups are announced on Mondays
• People like to start the summer being single
• A big peak right before Christmas
• The lowest day throughout the whole year is Christmas Day (thank God)

I never stop being amazed about how much Facebook can actually teach us about human behavior. When everything is being digitalized and searchable, some really interesting stuff appears.

You should watch the whole presentation on YouTube. Also, did you know that the volcano outbreak on Iceland was the first ever carbon neutral volcano? You’ll understand why in the video.

My number one killer-app for the iPad is hands down, the excellent Instapaper by Marco Arment.

I skim a lot of articles, and soon as they are interesting and of a certain length, I hit the Instapaper extension, Instachrome, that I use in Google Chrome. The whole article is then saved to Instapaper for iPad, stripped down to a text-and-images view, free of all the horrible advertisements and other badly designed elements that destroy the reading experience on a lot of websites. It all syncs seamlessy with an iPhone application as well.

Anyway, I think the iPad is by far the best reading device ever, so I’ve taken the time to really optimize this site for viewing with an iPad. It’s probably the best way to read the articles I post. While I was at it, I also optimized it for the iPhone.

Please send me an email or a message on twitter if you find any bugs.

I really want to become a better writer.

I want to write great, insightful articles. I want to comment on things that interest me, like amazing user interfaces, beautifully crafted experiences, new technology, business, web applications, Apple Inc and many others. I love to create, and to learn new amazingly cool stuff. I love details and I really enjoy people which go to great length about small topics. I appreciate the amazing work others do, and I hope to showcase lots of what people create and write.

I also want to share knowledge. Knowledge that I acquire from my own experiences creating two web applications, Timely (with a friend) and Coact (via my current employer), and knowledge that I acquire from other people.

This wont be a typical blog, it will probably fit somewhere between Twitter and a traditional blog. I like to look at it as a stream of things I enjoy.

I’ve removed everything from the previous site, including my portfolio and contact-page. I plan to add these things later on in time, but right now I want a site with only one goal; extremely satisfying to read. I think I’ve come pretty close. Smaller things like search, archive, etc will be added as I move forward. Comments are also disabled, but you’re welcome to send them to my twitter-account or via email.

Thanks for listening.