For lazy people

The creator of this lovely batch of
Tinginys. Yum yum yum. Take one...

Tinginys (Lazy bones)


This is a fridge cake, meaning that you mix everything then put it in the fridge for a few hours to make it set. It's called "lazy" because its stupidly easy to make. This should not be consumed by anyone watching their weight carefully. Ever.

Ingredients (exact amounts aren't crucial):
200g butter (82% fat, ie real butter. This is important: no margarine)
1 can (~150 - 200 mL) sweetened, condensed milk
2 or 3 heap tablespoons of cocoa
300g plain biscuits
Tbsp of nuts and/or raisins?

Method:
Break biscuits into small fingernail-size pieces, avoiding crumbs and crushed biscuits. Melt butter in saucepan. Add cocoa and stir in until well combined. Add sweetened, condensed milk. Combine liquid with biscuits and mix. Insert into a clean plastic bag and compress, removing bubbles from mix. Form a shape (flat disc or a roll or ...?). Insert into fridge and chill for four hours. Remove from bag, cut into pieces and eat (one).

Target customer: More money than sense

There are two interesting pricing strategies for us in the entrepreneurship class at university: one is cost-plus (the cost of production plus some sort of fixed margin. This is used for commodities and in industries that have high competition and little variation in quality). Then there is value based pricing (the perceived value to the user is taken into account, regardless of the actual price of production).

Value based pricing is particularly interesting in when it comes to marketing and sales of items that hold little value in themselves. What happens when there are too many players in the market or when some product becomes too generic is that people invent new values and attach them to their product by marketing.

I added the red arrows. Click to enlarge
 to see the difference in price.

A nice example of this is Moleskin notebooks. In essence, they are bound paper with or without lines. Some of them have other features like calendars. It is the added value that you pay for when you buy this little book for $40. Other notebooks of the same size cost $2. So what do you get, since you paid $38 more than the other guy? One would expect better binding. A nice cover perhaps? The rest is in your head: exclusivity ("look at me poor man, I'm fucking rich!"), luxury ("I'm worth it") and a few other things.

Usually people can't justify a rise in price unless there is some discernible change in quality. I mean we aren't complete fools right? We aren't going to pay more just to think that we are somehow cooler than the rest... right? Wrong.

Iittala is a brand from Finland that has taken it in its stride that all consumers are foolish enough and they are going to make them pay a fee to prove it. The company makes candle holders for tea lights, as well as various other home wares.

I admit that their goods are somewhat stylish and nice, but I really laugh about their pricing strategy because it has been so damned successful for them. In Sweden, almost every house that I've been to has at least one of these. Even the house we rent has two of them.

I added the red arrows. Click to enlarge
 to see the difference in price.

I've added some photos here to exemplify my point about their pricing strategy. Just so you know, there is no difference in size or weight or quality between the different colours. There is simply a new colour. Really. Take a look at the prices. At the time of writing, 100 SEK = €11.49 = AU$15.44.

Evidently this price strategy works because people go to each other's houses and look at the decorations and think to themselves "Oh I don't have the red colour in my Iittala candle holders" then they go home and nag their partner until they give in and fork out hundreds, if not thousands of kronor on these pieces of coloured glass.

If anyone cares to (dis)agree with this, feel free to comment, but more importantly, give me more examples of this please!

Vox populi: heard in class

Our new lecturer Ragnar is a favourite amongst the students. He makes people feel comfortable and more often than not he is laughing about something. The following was heard in class (sources will be protected!)

"You can't just say 'anyhow' in any sentence!!"

"He looks like Santa Claus. He has a beard and smiles a lot. I can imagine him with kids on his knee, giving them presents hehe."

If other funny things are heard in class feel free to put them in the comments :)

A night out in Malmö

Never underestimate the appeal a man with no face can have on a bunch of girls at a rock concert.

On Friday night we answered David's (a Mexican classmate of mine) call to go to Malmö where he lives for a pre-party and a concert by a friend of his at a local club.

The pre-party started after a sauna session I had with Max and Eric, setting the tone of the evening to "relaxed." At David's house we had popcorn, listened to The Doors and had a few chilled beers.

Every now and then David screamed in his trademark fashion to increase general excitement. David's screams are something like how I would sound if you poured a kettle of boiling water on my back...for him its just pure positive energy though :)

David had promised to go see one of his friends perform at Debaser, a club just near the Malmö city amusement park. We got there just as she was finishing her last song and thanking the crowd for listening. Whoops.

The next band were sort of lame...a local Swedish rock band called "If they ask, tell them we're dead." The sound guy was paying no attention to them, so that didn't help: their lead singer was completely inaudible and the backing vocalist was incredibly loud, so it sounded sort of crap. Maybe if they had been properly amped up, they would have sounded better: I'll give them the benefit of the doubt.

After a bit of DJ filler the next band with the man without a face came on. They were called Maps & Atlases. The lead singer/guitarist had such long hair coming out of his head (on the back and the front) that you could barely see any skin. Then he was wearing massive glasses so you couldn't really see his eyes. Imagine a nose emerging from a bush of hair...holding a guitar.

This band played what I later found out to be "math rock" because of its complicated rhythms. Actually they were quite good and the crowd was dancing. Maps & Atlases come from Chicago and are doing their first tour in Europe. See the video below for the song that they opened the set with. (note that his hair in this video isn't as long.)



After the concert I went to check out that desk where they sell CDs. There was an EP for 20 kr (about $4) and I wanted to support the band without shelling out $20 that I don't have to spend so I bought it instead of the LP.

I was dragged back stage by David to go speak to these fellas and I casually mentioned to the hairy guy that I bought his album and showed it to him. He informed me that I had bought the CD of the band who opened for them. That was a bit of a laugh.

We chatted about how they had come along in the US. I informed him that I'd never heard of him before, but he wasn't surprised. In the end his manager came in trying to act all tough and kicked us out. I wished hairball good luck on his tour.

Busy week of telling stories

This week has been a very busy one in our degree. We have had the submission of the second round business plan for Venture Cup, a competition in Sweden where you can win money for having the best business ideas. We also had the first round of Dragons at the University, a pitching competition that will be broadcast for TV, where you tell your idea to investors and they tell you if they would invest in your idea (if it were a real pitch). I've never seen the show, but I understand that it is made to be a little bit dramatic, so they might say some nasty things to us in order to get some reactions.

Click to enlarge.

The business plan was the big piece of work that we submitted during the week. Though Biggi isn't very good at interpreting recipes for pizza sauce, he is good as using InDesign to make attractive layouts (see picture). The plan was 31 pages in the end, but it will be expanded to be around double that size by the end of May.

If anyone had been wondering what I am doing for my project in the degree, the one sentence summary there is a pretty good start. You can see some of the furniture prototypes that were made by our researchers in the photos. Of course the rest of the plan won't be uploaded here, but you can get an inkling.

Today for the Dragons at the University, we went to the presentation where around 10 people, including university representatives, business angels, business incubator bosses and more were listening to our pitches all day. Out of 14 groups, we were one of the eight that were chosen who will go through to the next round with the actual investors (the cast of the TV show).

It's been an interesting week for sure and I feel like the degree is really starting to take off rather than being so theory based. On another note, the class has settled into our office space and there is a rhythm to the place now. Everyone who bothers to come to the office has more or less chosen a room they like and tend to work in them every day.

The road giveth and the road taketh...

Riding bikes in winter time can be a tricky thing. Various weather conditions that happen during the season can pop up at any moment and many of them just aren't familiar to me.

Riding bikes through snow is one thing: its tough on the legs because its like riding on the beach. Every now and then the snow buries a pot hole or a lump of ice, which can jump up and surprise you. Then there is regular ice, but somehow if you don't try to turn quickly, the stones for grip put down by the municipality sort that out just fine.

The hard one is when an ice storm hits, producing "black ice." An ice storm occurs when the temperature is below zero, but instead of snowing, it rains. The rain hits the ground and freezes immediately forming a perfectly flat (and incredibly slippery) surface. Its called black ice because its the colour of the road, but its still ice.

Damn you, Stoney McStone stone!

I was riding my bike home the other day when I came to the realization that while I was at a friend's house it had been raining and the ground was covered in super slick black ice. I had been riding on the stones that get put down for grip on the bike paths, but suddenly I wound up on a cobble stone road. Noticing that I was going to have serious trouble if I kept riding, but also realizing that I couldn't put the brakes on I decided to stop pedaling and see what would happen. The road was slightly downhill so I was picking up speed. Tentatively I tapped the pedal brakes (where you pedal backwards to stop the wheels), but just this was enough to make me lose control.

In less than a second my back wheel was in front of my front wheel and I was falling down on the stones. I managed to fall somehow without hurting myself, sliding along with the bike down the smooth road for about five metres. Getting up rather shocked and checking I hadn't lost or broken anything I moved to the side of the road to gather myself. A woman who was walking behind me at the time of the fall came over and said "Oh I wish I had a video camera at that moment." Well, thanks a lot for your kind words...

After walking home I noticed the metal mud guards were a bit bent and were rubbing on the front wheel, which had warped.

So on Monday when I went to ride again I fixed the mud guard and rode warily on a wonky front wheel. On the way home I went by an unusual route and was going down the hill when suddenly I rode into a small pothole in the bike lane. The jolt was enough to make me pay attention. Suddenly I remembered my wonky wheel and looked down to see if it was completely ruined. Nope, it was now corrected and running nice and straight.

Biggi's mistake

"I make no mistakes," Biggi told me. Birgir, or Biggi as we call him because its too hard to pronounce the Icelanding R's, is one of my course mates and part of our three man team that is making Bespoke Products for our business start up.

He's the hard man in the group: a real Viking. We often joke that he is the bad cop and I'm the good cop, but the solemn truth is that I'm scared of him. I only joined the group with him because I thought he might beat me up if I didn't. People that get in his way usually end up worse off than when they met him, so it was just plain survival instincts that made me choose him.

I guess I can say it here, behind the safety of my keyboard and screen, that Biggi was foolish enough miss the class pizza party that we had at my house. But later on, he decided that when his parents visited from Iceland that he would use my recipe for the pizza sauce. The problems is that he didn't know how to make it: he put the onion in raw instead of fried (It isn't gazpacho damn it!). This didn't go down very well with the furious Viking warrior.

After my black eye healed enough that I could see out of it, I decided that I'd write this post so I wouldn't forget the lesson.

Its ingredients, then method.
Ingredients, then method.
Ingredients, then method.
Ingredients, then method.
Ingredients, then method.