ABOUT ME

My first real job was awesome and very diverse. I worked in service, marketing and an accounting for a company called Músíknet ehf. Only few weeks after I started, we launched the third music streaming service in Europe, Tonlist.is.  In 2004 we won the Icelandic Web Awards and released Tonlist.com with a fantastic concert event in New York with an appearance from Bjork an the Icelandic Minister of Foreign Affairs.

At most the platform had around 30 thousand active users but when Spotify launched in Iceland in 2013 usage started to drop and the service eventually discontinued in 2019.

I worked at Nova for two great years. At Nova I started to get really into UI/UX design and the whole web development process. It was there where I designed my first real website, collaborating with an amazing designer, Dagur Hilmarsson (Pictured above in the right end), who I learned a lot from.

We re-designed the Nova.is and won the Icelandic Web Awards for the best Sales Web in 2010. I worked with many great people in marketing and web development at Nova. We won a lot of awards, including Imark’s Marketing Company of the year 2009. Great times.

Tens of thousands of users downloaded the app the first few weeks, users who then started applying for jobs and telling the companies that they had seen the advertisement in the Alfreð app.

The companies started to contact and inquire about this Alfreð person, meetings were booked, and the rest is history. 8 years later, Alfreð is by far the largest job platform in the country, with over 100,000 users and thousands of advertisers each year.

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I sold all my shares in Alfreð in
July 2020

At Tonlist.is I got the go-ahead to launch an Indie Record label called Cod Music. During the first two years I released 5 studio albums including a best-selling album by Lay Low and great albums by Dr. Mister & Mister Handsome, Jet Black Joe, Benny Crespo’s Gang, and Wulfgang.

After touring abroad with some of the bands and organizing hundreds of concerts I decided say goodbye to the music industry and head into a completely new direction.  

In 2011, however, I decided to leave Nova and, together with two of my colleagues at Nova, founded the app company Stokkur. 3 years earlier, they had launched the mobile parking service, Leggja, and asked me to design an app for them in late 2010. It was the first time I designed an app, and now there was no turning back.

Our first projects in Stokkur were the N1 app and the Domino’s app that transformed Domino’s sales channels during these years. We had seen the same thing happen with the Leggja app when our clientele grew significantly with the release of the app. During my time at Stokkur I also designed apps & webs for Strætó, Össur, Nova, CCP Games, Vodafone, Verifone, ASÍ (Klukk), Novomatic and many more.

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I sold all my shares in Stokkur in
July 2020

In 2015 we entered into a partnership with Nova, which at that time had become the largest mobile provider in Iceland. I worked closely with Liv (Pictured above), then Nova’s CEO, in designing what was to become the first Mobile Payment app in Iceland, Aur. The Aur solution came as a shock to the financial market in Iceland, it was new, it was fresh and nobody saw it coming. We had been able to develop a product using the current banking infrastructure in Iceland and payment facilitators without them having a clue we were doing it.

As a result many more FinTech solutions from start-ups and banks emerged to challenge Aur.  Today Aur remains the most popular peer-to-peer payment solution in Iceland. In March 2021 I sold all my shares in Aur to Kvika Bank who acquired all shares in the company.

I was fascinated by marketing and sales and started working at an advertising agency called “The Vatican” (Vatikanið). I participated in various advertising, promotion, and sales projects. But in 2008, in the middle of the banking crisis and after the Vatican dismantled, I decided to try and start my own business and offer services that were not being offered at that time in Iceland.

Social Media Marketing, SEO, YouTube Viral Marketing, etc. I worked on projects for Elko, Advania, the City of Reykjavik, and Nova, who eventually hired me full time in the fall of 2009.

One September night, 2012, I couldn’t fall asleep. I’d had the urge for a long time to create an app that would act as a person with an app icon as a cartoony face. Well that night, this person arrived in my head and did not want to leave. That night, Alfred was born.

I wrote and wrote, plotted and plotted. The name, the UI’s color, the font, the logo, the business plan, the whole concept from A-Z was born that magical night. 4 months later, the first version of the Alfred app and the Alfred Job Platform was released. Users could turn on a job watch and monitor certain job-tags and locations and then receive push notifications when a new job was published. The app was an instant hit.

During the first Covid "lockdown" in Iceland I sat down at my MacBook and started working on a new project, Frágangur.  Frágangur is a cloud-based software solution that handles all the necessary documents, car-financing and signatures related to vehicle trading, fully electronic, in just few minutes.  The company received a grant from the Technology Development Fund in Iceland.

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Shortly after I started working on a new advertising platform solution with my partner Andri. The platform is still in it's early beta stages and is called Púls Media.