Increasing Transparency and Competition

Interesting phenomena that the Norwegian government is encouraging competition, customer choice and transparency by creating portals that provides pricing information. The first portal was telepriser.no that provides info about broadband, mobile and telephony services, and the most recent announcement was finansportalen.no that provides pricing info about various financial services and products, e.g. insurance, banking and mutual funds.

High Tech in Trondheim, Norway

Trondheim is Norway's 3rd largest town, with a population of approximately 162000 (more Trondheim facts in Wikipedia).

Quote about Trondheim in Wired Magazine, 2000:
"This thousand-year-old city of 150,000 on the western Norwegian coast may seem an unlikely high tech locus. Yet through the combined efforts of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and the Sintef R&D center, the town is spitting out 20 new companies a year in sectors ranging from automation to telecommunications. The biggest impediment for new outfits in Trondheim, though, is still hard capital. "There's no legacy of venture capital in Norway," says Gary Ebersole, a VP for Clustra Systems, the Trondheim database company that spun out of Norwegian telco Telenor and recently transplanted to the US. Slowly, that's changing as young companies are gaining the worldwide presence to draw in VC funding."


Since then?
Google, Yahoo, ARM and Sun Microsystems have arrived in Trondheim (either through acquisitions or new engineering locations). More venture capital has also arrived. Several new startups have been started, e.g. nurtured in the University's Center of Innovation or other local incubators.