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The Norwegian Tech Industry is All at Sea (thenordicweb.com)
56 points by ilhackernews on May 3, 2014 | hide | past | favorite | 16 comments



Norway has quite a bit of hardware startups, which are otherwise rare in Europe. It's not all about Oil. Notable examples are:

- Nordic VLSI: Wireless ICs like nRF24L01, Basically responsible for the Blue Tooth Low Energy standard.

- AVR: Well known 8-Bit microprocessors. Sold to Atmel

- Energy Micro: Low Power ARM Microcontrollers. Sold to Silicon Labs.

- Phalanx: GPU Cores. Sold to ARM.


Also, Chipcon, sold to TI [1].

[1] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chipcon


Some better known Norwegian tech companies not 'at sea' are; Telenor & Nimsoft and Opera Software.


Submitters: please read the articles you post and make sure they aren't lifted from a more original source. If they are, submit that one instead. HN strongly prefers original sources.

We changed the url from http://www.geektime.com/2014/05/03/the-norwegian-tech-indust...


Thank you. I'm strongly in favor of link disambiguation.


Finally something I know about. Feel free to ask and I will try to answer :-)


When I had time to dive, I was looking at making a ROV or AUV to scout out dive sites and generally explore; are there a lot of hobby projects in that space, or is it all fairly high-end now? What I'd love is something designed for reef photography, ideally with days of dwell time.


The nearest I come to knowing anything about this is having used a waterproof camera-on-a-cable hooked up with fishing gear.

(However good friend of mine has worked on support vessels in the North Sea and had some amazing stories, complete w/pictures of big angler fish, Lophius piscatorius I think, caught with high end ROVs.)


You may find the OpenROV project to be of interest to you. http://www.openrov.com/


Do you think other nations can replicate Norway's success in avoiding the resource curse? If so, how?


Absolutely yes. But of course it depends.

Making sure to stay in the drivers seat instead of selling out to a big company was the first step.

Of course, if corruption is rampant everywhere this is much harder.

Also setting targets and staying true to them seems to be important. Today the target is not to use anything from their oil fortune except the interest. This is something they seem to fight about every year but the majority seems to say no to the party idea every time.


If their tech sector really has tilted strongly towards resource extraction it might be a sign that Norway isn't avoiding 'resource curse'.

Helping other countries extract fossil fuels more quickly might well exacerbate the planet's upcoming crises. So, from my perspective this is part of the problem.


The resource curse seems to be mitigated the more the local population is involved in the engineering and science of the various resource exploratin/extraction processes. Norway having a tech-sector to "tilt" towards resource extraction is itself highly unusual.


Fortunately it's not all resource extraction, there is also significant amounts of mobile tech, ref: http://memkite.com/2014/04/28/trondheim-the-unknown-mobile-t...


Partly agree. For now it seems to be keeping them afloat into 2050 or something provided they don't come up with something really stupid before that. After that they have the worlds 3rd largest Thorium reserve.

One good thing I think is at least they are not spending it as they extract it, rather investing it globally.


Quite a complex issue, this is a good talk about it though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8f6geiVdwpk




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