By Super Neuro
Several Nordic countries: Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Iceland, because of their unique geographical location, climatic conditions, and historical culture, have developed very different national temperaments, neutral and bland.
This cold temperament is not only reflected in their economic situation and cultural style, but also in their Internet products.
Although it is criticized for being cold, the minimalist Nordic style is quite popular in the design field
The winters in several Nordic countries are long and cold, which is completely different from the sunny Silicon Valley; their population is very small and is troubled by aging, which is different from the bustling Beijing and Shenzhen.
Some people must be confused. Is there an Internet entrepreneurial atmosphere in Northern Europe?
In fact, Northern Europe not only has quite active Internet startups of various types, but also has a unique "cold" culture that has spawned various minimalist and efficient engineering design concepts.
Spotify: Just listen to the music, no need to waste words
Spotify is a streaming music service platform that was launched in Stockholm, the capital of Sweden, in October 2008.
Compared with products like NetEase Cloud Music where "reading the comments is more interesting than listening to the songs", Spotify seems cool and simple. In two words: no nonsense, just listening to songs.
Spotify and NetEase Cloud Forum
As of the end of March this year, Spotify has 75 million paying users worldwide and nearly 200 million active users.
Mojang: Using the aesthetics of the 1990s to become popular today
You may not be familiar with Mojang, but when it comes to the popular mobile game Minecraft, I guess everyone knows it.
The latest data shows that almost all indicators of Minecraft have reached historical highs, with 144 million copies sold on more than a dozen platforms and 74 million active players playing the game every month. The Chinese version of Minecraft has also exceeded 100 million users this year.
Despite such a large scale of games, Mojang has always maintained a "small but beautiful" entrepreneurial rhythm before being acquired by Microsoft. Some media have compared data and found that the social game company Zynga has 3,000 employees and an annual cash flow of US$200 million.But when Mojang had a cash flow of about $100 million, the company only had 29 employees.
Opera: can attack or defend, can be straight or curved
Opera browser is a browser developed by the Norwegian company Opera Software ASA. It was founded in April 1995 and has been running stably for nearly 30 years.
As of the first quarter of this year, the monthly active users of Opera browser have reached 322 million, of which 264 million are on mobile devices.Opera added an independent application, Opera News, at the beginning of the year. It can be simply understood as Toutiao that makes personalized content recommendations. Currently, Opera News has 90.2 million monthly active users.
It was jointly acquired by Qihoo 360 and Kunlun Wanwei in 2016. Recently, Opera submitted an application for listing to the SEC.
It is rare for such an old Nordic technology company to maintain its vitality and innovation over the years in the ever-changing Internet.
Peltarion: AI can also be so frigid
The wave of artificial intelligence is sweeping the world, and even Northern Europe is no exception.
Peltarion is a Swedish startup that specializes in artificial neural networks and adaptive systems and provides software tools for them. Although it is across the Atlantic Ocean from Silicon Valley, Peltarion still gathers a group of excellent engineers.
The current situation in the industry is that many companies or individuals have built AI models through TensorFlow, Sage Maker, etc. However, in the actual commercial use process, users are still required to have certain professional knowledge and there are operational barriers.
Swedish team Peltarion thought about it.If you need help from others, you will inevitably need to communicate, which is really troublesome for Nordic people.
Pedestrians waiting for buses in Finland show Nordic characteristics: a comfortable distance of two meters
So Peltarion hopes to solve this problem and make an AI tool that can be used by non-professionals and junior data scientists, just like WordPress can be used to help people who don’t know HTML design websites.
Inspired by the structure of the human brain, Peltarion has developed a neural network that uses a graph to build and train custom neural networks.
Just like a flowchart, each step of the process is equivalent to a "layer" in a neural network. Each layer contains the parameters required to build a neural network, and the system automatically saves and backs up each layer so that the parameters can be modified when the result is wrong without losing the original chain.
Eventually (a few minutes or hours, depending on the purity and complexity of the dataset), the neural network will reach a stage where it can be generalized and users can integrate the created neural network into their own apps or websites and run it on Peltarion's servers.
Hooray! It's so convenient that you don't have to talk to others.