Northstream AB, a Stockholm, Sweden-based mobile industry management advising firm, is launching a new business acceleration program to provide industry expertise at a price new companies can afford.
Northstream CEO Bengt Nordström told RCR Wireless News that startups can benefit from traditional management services but generally cannot afford to engage professionals.
“We help startup companies, at a very affordable rate … get our strategic advice to get connected to the investment community we know through the clients we have,” he said.
“I think we will primarily focus on helping startups analyze if their business plan is the right one; whether they’re targeting the right customers; whether they have the right business model for selling their services or products,” he said.
Nordström called the Nordic startup scene “spectacular,” noting that Northstream was, just a decade ago, a burgeoning company.
Sweden went through an IT boom in the late 1990s/early 2000s, but many companies from that era were not successful, he said.
“Today, you have a lot of people who have a lot of experience from those days and are very skilled entrepreneurs and investors in startups.”
Nordström pointed to software-defined networks (SDN), network function virtualization (NFV) and cloud computing as not only enterprise trends but representative of an overlap between the IT and telecommunications industries.
“It’s originating from the IT world.,” he said. “It’s originating from the big data center players and the telecom industry thinks, ‘How is that relevant for me and will those developments mean that I face new competition?’”
He said that telecom companies come from a standardized background whereas IT firms are bred out of competition.
“As long as I’ve been working in this industry, we have always been looking at the IT industry with fear and excitement.”
Nordström also touched on the competition to telecom operators, Northstream’s primary focus area, coming from Over The Top (OTT) applications like FaceBook and WhatsApp.
“The OTTs are actually still very good news for the operators,” he said. “The reason why people are so attached to their smartphones is because of innovation that has come from outside the industry. In many ways, OTTs are operators’ best friends, but I understand the threat they feel.”
For more videos about the Stockholm startup ecosystem, click here to visit the RCR Wireless News YouTube channel.
