Holmenkollen celebrates cross-country skiing and other winter sports in a nation that reveres them. Even the competitors admit the fun is infectious.
Tag Archives: Norway
What to Know About Western Tanks Going to Ukraine
Western allies have pledged to send at least 105 tanks, far less than Ukraine says it needs, and it may be months before they join the battle.
A Wagner Fighter Defects to Norway, Promising to Expose Russian War Crimes
The rare defection by a former member of the notorious Russian paramilitary force could aid investigations into Moscow’s atrocities.
In a Wary Arctic, Norway Starts to See Russian Spies Everywhere
Other European countries are too, blurring the line between vigilance and paranoia.
Safety Concerns Overshadow Europe’s First New Gas Link in Decades
Natural gas is set to flow through a new undersea pipeline between Norway and Poland after suspected sabotage devastated the Nord Stream pipelines.
Heilung Puts a Heavy Metal Twist on the Sound of the Vikings
The band Heilung performs on replica instruments to recreate the sound world of pre-Christian Europe and bring it into the modern age.
A Famous Walrus Is Killed, and Norwegians Are Divided
The killing of Freya has polarized Oslo and threatens to blight the image of a country more commonly associated with diplomatic good deeds than mob-like hits.
Europe’s Scorching Summer Puts Unexpected Strain on Energy Supply
The dry summer has reduced hydropower in Norway, threatened nuclear reactors in France and crimped coal transport in Germany. And that’s on top of Russian gas cuts.
A Walrus Named Freya Showed Up in Norway. Did She Have to Die?
Three days after issuing a warning, the authorities put down the 1,300-pound marine mammal. Critics said that the decision was unnecessary.
A 1,300-Pound Walrus Could Be Killed if She Endangers the Public
Freya has been lounging on boats and eating mussels in Norway, but authorities have started to worry about her presence.
The Problem in Coaching Style Without Substance
England’s 8-0 thrashing of Norway was a stunning triumph. But it also exposed a failure of leadership.
Jakob Ingebrigtsen Does Not Plan on Losing at the World Championships
The Kardashians of Norway are middle-distance runners who have competed on the global stage. But it’s Jakob, 21, who transformed from onetime prodigy to generational talent.
Oslo Shooting Is Being Investigated as Terrorism, Police Say
The attack, which killed two people and seriously wounded 10 near a gay club in Oslo, came hours before the city’s Pride parade, which has now been canceled.
2 Killed and at Least 14 Wounded in Shooting in Norway’s Capital
The shooting happened near a popular gay club in downtown Oslo, on the weekend when the city is set to host its Pride parade.
More Than Fjords: A New Museum to Put Oslo on the Map
City administrators hope Norway’s new National Museum will help Oslo, and the rest of the country, step out of its Scandinavian neighbors’ shadows.
Sports in Norway, Like Skiing and Bobsledding, Face Threat From Warming Arctic
Skiing, hiking and dogsledding will never be the same in Svalbard, Norway, which has warmed more than twice as quickly as the rest of the Arctic. The islands may be isolated, but the changes aren’t.
Sunflower Oil ‘Vanishes’ as Ukraine War Grinds On
Several British supermarkets have joined other chains around the world in asking shoppers to limit their cooking oil purchases, as supplies dwindle and prices rise.
Melting ice in a Norwegian alpine pass reveals a 1,500-year-old shoe
Enlarge / Conservation efforts for the shoe included careful reshaping and freeze-drying. (credit: Secrets of the Ice)
Sometime between 200 and 500 CE, someone crossing a high mountain pass in Norway discarded a shoe. More than 1,500 years later, an unusually warm summer melted centuries of accumulated snow and ice, revealing the ancient shoe—and an assortment of other objects left behind by ancient and medieval travelers on the snowy mountain trails. Archaeologists with the Secrets of the Ice project recovered the shoe in 2019, finished conserving it in 2021, and recently published a report about the site and the finds.
The report “is for internal archiving only and [is] not published,” Secrets of the Ice co-director Lars Holger Pilø told Ars in an email. “In addition, it is in Norwegian.”
But Pilø and his colleagues recently shared some highlights via the project’s social media and in a conversation with Ars.
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For Russians and Ukrainians in Norway, the War Has Deepened the Chill
The war and the comments of a Russian diplomat have strained relations on an archipelago in Norway where Russians, Ukrainians and Norwegians have lived peacefully for decades.
Ada Hegerberg Wants to See How Good She Can Be
The world’s best women’s player lost nearly two years to injury. Now she’s back and eager to get herself, Lyon and maybe even Norway to the top.
4 U.S. Marines Killed in Osprey Crash in Norway
The police said that the tilt-rotor aircraft, which was taking part in a NATO training exercise, crashed on Friday evening, killing all crew members aboard.
‘Free Ukraine Street’: Russian Embassies Get Pointed New Addresses
Officials in many European cities are giving streets, squares and intersections in front of Russian missions names with pro-Ukraine themes.
Norway Out in Front in Medal Count at Winter Olympics
Norway won its record 15th gold medal on Friday, the kind of success that has drawn experts from other countries trying figure out how the tiny nation keeps doing it.
Why Are Other Languages Better at Conveying Feelings Than English?
Words that capture an entire culinary experience or mood — such as “utepils,” in Norwegian — are common in other languages. English has a few such words, too.
Water Supplies From Glaciers May Peak Sooner Than Anticipated
New satellite mapping of the world’s mountain ice suggests Earth’s glaciers may contain less water than previously thought.
Anders Behring Breivik, Norwegian Terrorist, Is Denied Parole
Mr. Breivik, who killed 77 people in the worst crime in modern Norwegian history, has served 10 years of a 21-year sentence.
Kristian Blummenfelt Is the Triathlon’s Data-Driven Future
The most advanced science in the triathlon world can be found in Norway, where athletes embrace the data found in heat sensors, oxygen measuring masks and their feces.
Is Norway the Future of Cars?
The speed by which electric vehicles have taken over Norway has stunned even the cars’ enthusiasts.
A Widening Web of Undersea Cables Connects Britain to Green Energy
Linking one nation’s power grid with another’s is considered essential as more electricity is generated from solar and wind.
How to Catch a Polar Bear
First, spot the bear.
Denmark and Norway Predict Drastic Spike in Omicron Cases
Health authorities in Europe are warning of a sharp increase in Omicron cases, adding to an existing surge from the Delta variant.
U.S. and Others Pledge Export Controls Tied to Human Rights
The Biden administration’s partnership with Australia, Denmark, Norway, Canada, France, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom aims to stem the flow of key technologies to authoritarian governments.
Bearing Witness to Svalbard’s Fragile Splendor
To visitors, the Norwegian archipelago can seem both ethereal and eternal. But climate change all but guarantees an eventual collapse of its vulnerable ecosystem.
Court in Philippines Allows Maria Ressa to Travel to Norway for Nobel
The decision came after days of growing international pressure on the government to allow the journalist to attend the ceremony in Norway.
As Earth Warms, Human History Is Melting Away
Climate change is revealing long-frozen artifacts and animals to archaeologists. But the window for study is slender and shrinking.
Handball Federation Ends Bikini Bottom Requirement for Women
After outrage over a fine levied against the Norwegian women’s beach handball team for competing in shorts, the sport’s international federation said it was changing its rules.
In Norway Attack, ‘Sharp Object,’ Not Arrows, Killed 5, Police Say
The Norwegian police on Monday said that while a hunting bow had been used in last week’s rampage, the victims, four women and a man, were stabbed to death.
Town Rattled by Bow-and-Arrow Killings Ponders Terrorism and Mental Illness
The police in Norway, initially pointing to Islamic extremism, now say an attacker was “not well, mentally.”
Suspect Confesses in Bow-and-Arrow Rampage in Norway
Espen Anderson Brathen has been charged with murder in the deaths of five people after the authorities say he went on a killing spree armed with a hunting bow.
Man Is Charged in Bow-and-Arrow Attack in Norway That Killed 5
The police said that the suspect, a 37-year-old Danish citizen, was a recent convert to Islam who had shown signs of radicalization.
Norway Bow and Arrow Attack Leaves Several Dead
As the country went on alert, the police scrambled to investigate an attack in a town 50 miles outside Oslo.
Trams, Cable Cars, Electric Ferries: How Cities Are Rethinking Transit
Urban transportation is central to the effort to slow climate change. It can’t be done by just switching to electric cars. Several cities are starting to electrify mass transit.
This Fjord Shows Even Small Populations Create Giant Microfiber Pollution
Researchers found that one tiny Arctic village’s unfiltered sewage produces as much microplastic as the treated waste of more than a million people.
What we can learn from edtech startups’ expansion efforts in Europe
It’s a story common to all sectors today: investors only want to see ‘uppy-righty’ charts in a pitch. However, edtech growth in the past 18 months has ramped up to such an extent that companies need to be presenting 3x+ growth in annual recurring revenue to even get noticed by their favored funds.
Some companies are able to blast this out of the park — like GoStudent, Ornikar and YouSchool — but others, arguably less suited to the conditions presented by the pandemic, have found it more difficult to present this kind of growth.
One of the most common themes Brighteye sees in young companies is an emphasis on international expansion for growth. To get some additional insight into this trend, we surveyed edtech firms on their expansion plans, priorities and pitfalls. We received 57 responses and supplemented it with interviews of leading companies and investors. Europe is home 49 of the surveyed companies, six are based in the U.S., and three in Asia.
Going international later in the journey or when more funding is available, possibly due to a VC round, seems to make facets of expansion more feasible. Higher budgets also enable entry to several markets nearly simultaneously.
The survey revealed a roughly even split of target customers across companies, institutions and consumers, as well as a good spread of home markets. The largest contingents were from the U.K. and France, with 13 and nine respondents respectively, followed by the U.S. with seven, Norway with five, and Spain, Finland, and Switzerland with four each. About 40% of these firms were yet to foray beyond their home country and the rest had gone international.
International expansion is an interesting and nuanced part of the growth path of an edtech firm. Unlike their neighbors in fintech, it’s assumed that edtech companies need to expand to a number of big markets in order to reach a scale that makes them attractive to VCs. This is less true than it was in early 2020, as digital education and work is now so commonplace that it’s possible to build a billion-dollar edtech in a single, larger European market.
But naturally, nearly every ambitious edtech founder realizes they need to expand overseas to grow at a pace that is attractive to investors. They have good reason to believe that, too: The complexities of selling to schools and universities, for example, are widely documented, so it might seem logical to take your chances and build market share internationally. It follows that some view expansion as a way of diversifying risk — e.g. we are growing nicely in market X, but what if the opportunity in Y is larger and our business begins to decline for some reason in market X?
International expansion sounds good, but what does it mean? We asked a number of organizations this question as part of the survey analysis. The responses were quite broad, and their breadth to an extent reflected their target customer groups and how those customers are reached. If the product is web-based and accessible anywhere, then it’s relatively easy for a company with a good product to reach customers in a large number of markets (50+). The firm can then build teams and wider infrastructure around that traction.
Norway’s ‘Climate Election’ Puts Center-Left in Charge
Global warming and the future of the country’s oil and gas industry dominated the election campaign, yet smaller parties with ambitious approaches on climate fared less well than expected.
Billogram, provider of a payments platform specifically for recurring billing, raises $45M
Payments made a huge shift to digital platforms during the Covid-19 pandemic — purchasing moved online for many consumers and businesses; and a large proportion of those continuing to buy and sell in-person went cash-free. Today a startup that has been focusing on one specific aspect of payments — recurring billing — is announcing a round of funding to capitalize on that growth with expansion of its own. Billogram, which has built a platform for third parties to build and handle any kind of recurring payments (not one-off purchases), has closed a round of $45 million.
The funding is coming from a single investor, Partech, and will be used to help the Stockholm-based startup expand from its current base in Sweden to six more markets, Jonas Suijkerbuijk, Billogram’s CEO and founder, said in an interview, to cover more of Germany (where it’s already active now), Norway, Finland, Ireland, France, Spain, and Italy.
The company got its start working with SMBs in 2011 but pivoted some years later to working with larger enterprises, which make up the majority of its business today. Suijkerbuijk said that in 2020, signed deals went up by 300%, and the first half of 2021 grew 50% more on top of that. Its users include utilities like Skanska Energi and broadband company Ownit, and others like remote healthcare company Kry, businesses that take invoice and take monthly payments from their customers.
While there has been a lot of attention around how companies like Apple and Google are handling subscriptions and payments in apps, what Billogram focuses on is a different beast, and much more complex: it’s more integrated into the business providing services, and it may involve different services, and the fees can vary over every billing period. It’s for this reason that, in fact, even big companies in the realm of digital payments, like Stripe, which might even already have products that can help manage subscriptions on their platforms, partner with companies like Billogram to build the experiences to manage their more involved kinds of payment services.
I should point out here that Suijkerbuijk told me that Stripe recently became a partner of Billograms, which is very interesting… but he also added that a number of the big payments companies have talked to Billogram. He also confirmed that currently Stripe is not an investor in the company. “We have a very good relationship,” he said.
It’s not surprising to see Stripe and others wanting to more in the area of more complex, recurring billing services. Researchers estimate that the market size (revenues and services) for subscription and recurring billing will be close to $6 billion this year, with that number ballooning to well over $10 billion by 2025. And indeed, the effort to make a payment or any kind of transaction will continue to be a point of friction in the world of commerce, so any kinds of systems that bring technology to bear to make that easier and something that consumers or businesses will do without thinking about it, will be valuable, and will likely grow in dominance. (It’s why the more basic subscription services, such as Prime membership or a Netflix subscription, or a cloud storage account, are such winners.)
Within that very big pie, Suijkerbuijk noted that rather than the Apples and Googles of the world, the kinds of businesses that Billogram currently competes against are those that are addressing the same thornier end of the payments spectrum that Billogram is. These include a wide swathe of incumbent companies that do a lot of their business in areas like debt collection, and other specialists like Scaleworks-backed Chargify — which itself got a big investment injection earlier this year from Battery Ventures, which put $150 million into both it and another billing provider, SaaSOptics, in April.
The former group of competitors are not currently a threat to Billogram, he added.
“Debt collecting agencies are big on invoicing, but no one — not their customers, nor their customers’ customers — loves them, so they are great competitors to have,” Suijkerbuijk joked.
This also means that Billogram is not likely to move into debt collection itself as it continues to expand. Instead, he said, the focus will be on building out more tools to make the invoicing and payments experience better and less painful to customers. That will likely include more moves into customer service and generally improving the overall billing experience — something we have seen become a bigger area also during the pandemic, as companies realized that they needed to address non-payments in a different way from how their used to, given world events and the impact they were having on individuals.
“We are excited to partner with Jonas and the team at Billogram.” says Omri Benayoun, General Partner at Partech, in a statement. “Having spotted a gap in the market, they have quietly built the most advanced platform for large B2C enterprises looking to integrate billing, payment, and collection in one single solution. In our discussion with leading utilities, telecom, e-health, and all other clients across Europe, we realized how valuable Billogram was for them in order to engage with their end-users through a top-notch billing and payment experience. The outstanding commercial traction demonstrated by Billogram has further cemented our conviction, and we can’t wait to support the team in bringing their solution to many more customers in Europe and beyond!”
What Does It Mean for a Whole Nation to Become Uninhabitable?
“It’s changing quite rapidly,” says a hunter in Canada. “And I’m not old at all. I’m 31.”
Facing Outrage Over Bikini Rule, Handball League Signals ‘Likely’ Change
In the weeks since Norway’s women’s beach handball team was fined for wearing shorts instead of bikini bottoms, other countries have increased pressure for a change in federation rules.
Women’s Handball Players Are Fined for Rejecting Bikini Uniforms
Norway’s beach handball players were each fined 150 euros for wearing shorts rather than the required bikini bottoms. A spokeswoman for the International Handball Federation said she didn’t know the reason for the rule.
US blames China for Exchange server hacks and ransomware attacks
The Biden administration has formally accused China of the mass-hacking of Microsoft Exchange servers earlier this year, which prompted the FBI to intervene as concerns rose that the hacks could lead to widespread destruction.
The mass-hacking campaign targeted Microsoft Exchange email servers with four previously undiscovered vulnerabilities that allowed the hackers — which Microsoft already attributed to a China-backed group of hackers called Hafnium — to steal email mailboxes and address books from tens of thousands of organizations around the United States.
Microsoft released patches to fix the vulnerabilities, but the patches did not remove any backdoor code left behind by the hackers that might be used again for easy access to a hacked server. That prompted the FBI to secure a first-of-its-kind court order to effectively hack into the remaining hundreds of U.S.-based Exchange servers to remove the backdoor code. Computer incident response teams in countries around the world responded similarly by trying to notify organizations in their countries that were also affected by the attack.
In a statement out Monday, the Biden administration said the attack, launched by hackers backed by China’s Ministry of State Security, resulted in “significant remediation costs for its mostly private sector victims.”
“We have raised our concerns about both this incident and the [People’s Republic of China’s] broader malicious cyber activity with senior PRC Government officials, making clear that the PRC’s actions threaten security, confidence, and stability in cyberspace,” the statement read.
The National Security Agency also released details of the attacks to help network defenders identify potential routes of compromise. The Chinese government has repeatedly denied claims of state-backed or sponsored hacking.
The Biden administration also blamed China’s Ministry of State Security for contracting with criminal hackers to conduct unsanctioned operations, like ransomware attacks, “for their own personal profit.” The government said it was aware that China-backed hackers have demanded millions of dollars in ransom demands against hacked companies. Last year, the Justice Department charged two Chinese spies for their role in a global hacking campaign that saw prosecutors accuse the hackers of operating for personal gain.
Although the U.S. has publicly engaged the Kremlin to try to stop giving ransomware gangs safe harbor from operating from within Russia’s borders, the U.S. has not previously accused Beijing of launching or being involved with ransomware attacks.
“The PRC’s unwillingness to address criminal activity by contract hackers harms governments, businesses, and critical infrastructure operators through billions of dollars in lost intellectual property, proprietary information, ransom payments, and mitigation efforts,” said Monday’s statement.
The statement also said that the China-backed hackers engaged in extortion and cryptojacking, a way of forcing a computer to run code that uses its computing resources to mine cryptocurrency, for financial gain.
The Justice Department also announced fresh charges against four China-backed hackers working for the Ministry of State Security, which U.S. prosecutors said were engaged in efforts to steal intellectual property and infectious disease research into Ebola, HIV and AIDS, and MERS against victims based in the U.S., Norway, Switzerland and the United Kingdom by using a front company to hide their operations.
“The breadth and duration of China’s hacking campaigns, including these efforts targeting a dozen countries across sectors ranging from healthcare and biomedical research to aviation and defense, remind us that no country or industry is safe. Today’s international condemnation shows that the world wants fair rules, where countries invest in innovation, not theft,” said deputy attorney general Lisa Monaco.