So I'm going to start with taking a picture of all of you, so you have to smile. I think it's a bit unfair that you take pictures of people on stage and we can't take pictures of you. So I'm Peter, I've been here, I think this is my third or fourth time,

and I'm happy that Daniel took some of my time because I don't think I have too much to talk about this time. I'm speaking less and less all the time, I'm a bit stressed. So I'm not going to take too much of your lunch time. And I'm going to try to be very brief, so I'm going to show you some videos.

Hopefully you know what Flatter is, but if you don't know, I'm just going to show a one minute long video that explains the concept. It's important to me. Hopefully this works.

For bloggers and their readers, musicians and their listeners, photographers, film creators, programmers, and so on. So we created Flatter to solve this. This is how it works. Every month the Flatter user pays a small fee. Let's compare it with birthday cake.

When you have a cake you want to give slices to the people you like. Flatter helps you do that. If you've created something, you can add a Flatter button to your content. Or if you find something you like and there's a Flatter button besides the content, you click it.

Each button is a counter showing how many people are willing to give cake for the content. At the end of the month, your cake is sliced in as many pieces as you clicked Flatter buttons. Each slice is then given to the correct content creators. If you click ten buttons, the ten creators will get a tenth of the cake each.

If you click a hundred buttons, the hundred creators will get a hundredth of the cake. The slices might be small, but everyone's slices will all add up. Or as we say in Sweden, As a creator, you will get money you've never got before. As a consumer, you can help creators out with just a small click.

If you haven't guessed it, Flatter is a wordplay of flatter and flat rate. With a flat rate fee, you can flatter people. Okay, so now you know if you didn't know. It's been a really weird year because we started with Flatter I think almost exactly one year ago.

And we first told people about it here at Republic actually. And it kind of exploded in Germany. So that's why we've been waiting actually to release some new things with Flatter until we're here. So it kind of gives something back. The idea with Flatter for me has always been that I wanted to do something to help people that create,

get money from people who want to pay for it. Or give money back to people that they want to support. Because it was always these discussions and kind of the copy fight that I was part of. Talking about copyright and all of that. About how to do that. My view of course was that we are creating so much material on sites like these.

Like Flickr and all of these different websites and putting up for free. But we're never talking about if we should make money from them. But the people who are used to making money always complain that we are taking things from them. So Flatter kind of is a solution for me to help us get to the next phase. Where we don't need the middleman.

Maybe we need distribution, yes. But we sold that with the internet. But we don't need the middleman anymore. So since last year. I'm just going to go a bit through so you know the history of this. Actually Flatter is older than a year. The first Flatter was in 2006. I started with it a really long time ago.

In 2008 I got the sign for it. And it looked really bad. So one thing that we've been doing is that we've been fixing Flatter to look much better. Because it really sucked. We're technologists. We make good technology. But we can't make the sign for whatever it's worth. And that has been a really big problem for us. Because I've been telling friends that you should use Flatter.

And I've told them that proximity height works and so on. And they kind of get it. And they try to find information on the website. And they kind of get it. But they really don't. So the sign has been something which is really crucial for us. To get the right user experience. And since I'm a bit lazy I'm going to show you another video. Which is kind of the thing that happened after we released Flatter to the public.

Like still people didn't get it. Even though a lot of people did. This was the average person's saying. It's a really funny video. So that's why I'm going to show you. Thanks. Hey YouTube. I just want to talk a little bit about Flatter.

I just saw this site on the internet actually. It's pretty good for YouTube users. If you want you can go and check it out. Because it's like down at the link. I'm going to post a video of the commercial video.

I'm going to post a link on the commercial video. Yeah. It's pretty good actually. I mean like it's a site that... How do you explain it? You can link... I think it's like this.

You can link the continent from YouTube to the site. Or you can upload it to Flatter all at once. I think it's like... A site that makes people share.

But you pay a small fee for it. Like if you... For example... If you stay like this. The opening fee I think was 2 euros I think. Or maybe it's more. I don't know. I just read through it.

I don't even know sometimes. But it's pretty cool anyways. It makes the people, we the people. Like bloggers, YouTubers, Facebook, pictures, everything.

Everything they write. Your materials that you own. It's everything. And if they like it, they flatter you. You get a flatter button when you subscribe to this. And I'm going to post it down at the description.

So just check it out if you want to. It's pretty cool. Freaking awesome. I don't know what it's actually about.

You need to get your own idea what it is. And I think it's pretty cool anyways. Because we, or the movie industry. This is like made by us.

We do the flatter. Like if you... There's a commercial down there. So you can like watch it or something. Because I can't explain it right now. But if you watch it, maybe you can. You know, what it is anyways.

So anyways, look at the users of YouTube, I mean.

Yeah. So we kind of learned that we have a communication problem. It's really cool. It's really great. It's awesome. But I don't really get it. So this is, it's not his fault.

It might be a bit. But it's rather our fault. So the thing we've been doing quite a lot is to get people to understand the concept a bit more. So, just to go through a bit. In Germany, people really understood the concept. It might not just be because I was here a lot and talked about flatter. It's because you really are interested in these things.

So, for instance, we have Tim Pridloff, which is a big podcaster that you probably all know, who's been one of the poster boys for flatter and discussed flatter quite a lot. And he's making thousands and thousands of euros on flatter. And we've been really happy about that. Because it helps us quite a lot to have a really good community. And it's not only Tim. It's Marcus Beckett, that's a politic.

And basically, they just preached flatter and everyone started using it, including some really large German newspapers. And we haven't seen this outside of Germany. We've seen some top bloggers in some countries, but not this widespread use. And we've been really happy about that. Yeah, thank you.

Then there's the other thing. Flatter, the past year, we noticed that some of the things we're doing are really important, not because of the thing that we started thinking about, but it's also because there's a lot of assholes on the internet, and in the business world particularly. So you just heard Daniel speak before me,

and he spoke about Open Leaks. But before Open Leaks, he was part of WikiLeaks. And WikiLeaks has had a really strange year, releasing a lot of stuff and getting banned from a lot of places, including Sweden, but also being banned from all of the big money providers in the world. So like Visa and PayPal, the Mastercard,

and all of these really huge corporations decided you cannot give money to WikiLeaks. You can give money to KKK. You can buy prostitutes in Thailand, but you cannot give money to WikiLeaks. That's where we draw the line. It's a good line to draw, apparently. So we decided that we have to do something about this as well. So we helped WikiLeaks get some money.

I don't know if I should say how much, but it was some money at least, and it was because people wanted to donate. So we've been studying up quite a lot for these ideals. And we won some awards, which is also great, because people think we really think great. The best award we won is actually the Hula Bandula Band Award in Sweden.

You probably never heard of them. They're a really cool Swedish band that played very progressive rock music, and they are really against file sharing. So for me, it's a big thing that they would give me an award or us an award for what we did, because they believe that it's really important that we stand up for democracy and freedom of speech. And we also won some really non-interesting things,

such as Best Startup and all of that. That doesn't mean anything, but it's nice to have them. So, as I said, I'm not going to be, you know, the person standing between you and lunch too much. So I'm going to go into some news. We released a QR code feature during this year.

For those who don't know QR codes, it's these small printable things that you can put off offline, which means that you can actually go offline and do internet stuff. So you can flatter physical things, like this person playing music in the streets. It's kind of fun. We wanted to make people understand that flatter is not just about the web.

It's about any type of content, wherever you are. And I don't think that QR codes will be really, you know, widely used, but it's a really cool feature. And it's also very good marketing. Another thing we released this year, which people, we didn't push for it, but it became apparent that we needed it because of the WikiLeaks thing mostly, is direct donations.

So if you have a flatter account, you can send an exact sum of money to someone else that also has a flatter account. So you can actually give four euros to your friends or whatever. But it will always be anonymous. You can never tell anyone, you know, buy anything with it. We're not trying to become a new payment method. We want to still be flatter and have our own niche and be about creativity.

But it's there if you want to use it. And it's not really news for those who read our blog. But still, it's quite new. And some news that you might have known as well, is that we are translating flatter into different languages. German was done yesterday, I think,

and I think it's released right now as we're speaking. So flatter will be in German. It will also be in French and in Spanish, and hopefully all of those will be up today. But we think this is really important, because one of the things we saw with flatter is that even though we really sucked at communication, it's even worse that we don't have communication in the language that people try to read it in.

So hopefully that will change things. So I must also say that the community has done all of the translation for us. We have not used any form of professional translator, but we've just been testing everything on the community, and they've been doing everything. And it looks really, really good. So I'm really happy about that.

Thank you. So then we're doing revenue sharing. I have hinted about a year that we want to do. But as you might know, we take a 10% cut from the money coming into flatter, and that's way too much. But we wanted to start somewhere, and we're not really stupid,

so we understand that it's better to take 10% than go down than take zero and go up. It's for marketing things. But what we really want to do is to take the 10% and share them with people that help with distribution. So let's say you have a blogging site where you allow people to put up their own blogs. And if they have flatter buttons,

you can get a portion of our money. So we never touch the 90%, but the 10% that we get, we can revenue share with you. And we will start with this in May. That means that if you have a syndicated blog network, whatever, or video sites, anything like that, you can actually make money from giving people free content or giving out content for other people for free.

So if you help with distribution, you should get a share of the money as well. So that will be an automatic feature that everyone can sign up for, and we will not discriminate. We will let everyone have the same possibilities. That's very important to us. So that's one of the news coming. And then probably the biggest news, which internally in flatter is like everyone is really psyched right now

that I'm going to talk about this because it's been something we've been working really hard on. And most people outside of flatter probably don't see the big difference until you think about it. But the thing is, with flatter today, you have to register all the content that you want to be flatterable. So if you want to have a button somewhere,

you also have to register and have a count of all of this. But we're changing that. That means that anything can be flatter now, starting from 1 May, I think, as well. So if you find something you like, you can just put it into flatter and send money to someone, and it will be in a pending queue for them. So if you can get, for instance, from 1 May,

you can flatter anything on Twitter. So if someone writes a really nice tweet, you could flatter it. And they will have a small message saying, you have money waiting for you. You have a flatter waiting for you. So you have to sign up to get it. But still, we can start kind of being a bit more aggressive to make people come to flatter because that's really important. Because if flatter is going to work, we have to be a very large network of people.

And the larger we are, the better it is for everyone. It will also work for people that, yet again, have big syndicated networks of content. So yet again, if you're a blog network, you can just add flatter buttons to all of the content and just say, you know, I know this email has this content

or is the creator of this content. That will make it much easier for people to integrate flatter. And we think that this will open up a really big kind of floodgate for material, which has been a big problem for us to get material in. So hopefully you will start doing that. And now everyone at home is like, yeah,

he sounded so bored by that, sorry. So another thing that's coming later this year is that we're trying to integrate flatter into more offline things, like media players. So we are finding ways that you can flatter, for instance, an MP3 song from within your MP3 player or maybe from VLC or from any of the other ones,

the really big media players. And that is something that we're not working out ourselves, but only with people that actually work in this community. So that will be quite interesting to see because we really want to be where the content is. And that's the way to do it, I think. And since I promised not to be too long

and already been 18 minutes, I'm just going to take some questions instead. So thank you very much.

I hate not getting questions. That's the worst thing ever. If I get flattered without having an account and I don't want to get the money,

what will happen to the money? It will go back to the person that flattered you. So it will be just reversed. We're not taking money from everyone. We're just claiming money for you, like any holdings for you if you want. How much time? We haven't really decided that. Or maybe they've decided at the office without telling me. But I think we will see what happens there. One thing which is very typical for flattery

is that we're still experimenting every time we do something. We have no answers. We only have questions. It's like jeopardy. So that's the way we look at things. Thank you. How is it for you to have to deal with business angels and media managers and all these kind of weird business people?

Well, we don't really do business. That's the problem, maybe. But we are talking to some of these people, but we have some really clever people working with us. Last year, when I was here, I think we were four people at Flatter and now we're 13 and we're still growing. We employ people all the time that deal with this.

So hopefully I don't have to deal with the things I know nothing about. I can go and speak, which I know very little about as well, but I try. But it's very weird, because some of the coming from my background with the pirate band, all of that, it's sometimes weird to come into places

where people give you awards and all of that. A really interesting thing was I went to UNESCO and picked up an award for helping with culture in the world, and this French guy is giving me an award and speaking about, you know, asking me, so how is it coming from Sweden, making something as creative as this to help people make money from the internet? You only have these pirate things.

Like, yeah, oh, he didn't realize who I was. So that was kind of weird, but it's also kind of nice sometimes not to be, you know, just this guy from Pirate Bay. Right, here's another question. That was it? No, here. About the 10% cut and the revenue sharing. I haven't quite understood.

So you're not planning in the foreseeable future to go down from the 10%? And second, who can apply for this revenue sharing? For instance, I'm running a self-hosted blog. Can I apply for revenue sharing as well? Yeah, so we will go down from the 10%, but we, you know, the revenue sharing will be of the percentages that we have left, kind of.

We haven't decided any numbers yet, so that's the thing we're working out until the 1st of May. But it will be based on volume, so if you have enough traffic, you will be your own revenue. You can do revenue sharing with yourself just because your blog is big enough or you have enough volume. Is that it? Is that it?

I think people want to eat. Oh, there's one. Where? Somewhere. He's running. I'm from the UK where Flatter is very little used on blogs,

which is different from the situation in Germany where you have a critical mass already. Do you have any tips about how you might build up a critical mass of bloggers using Flatter, which I could take back to the UK? Yeah. Well, I think that you should just tell everyone about Flatter and tell why it's good and better than Matthias, the guy in the video, hopefully.

But I think spreading the word and also just having buttons everywhere because if the button is everywhere, people will click it and they will understand what it is in the end. That's kind of the catch-22 problem we've had is that because it's everywhere in Germany, everyone knows about it and because it's nowhere in the UK, no one knows about it and will not know about it. So we have to just kind of be aggressive on that

and put the buttons everywhere if you can. Hi. Do you have any number about how much money is being transferred via Flatter right now? Well, so that number is growing all the time, but I think it's about 100,000 euros per month

that is being transferred via Flatter every month. So it is becoming substantial amounts, but it's not big enough. Previously, I've always said, you know, we don't want to be the solution and so on, but of course I want global domination. I'm not thinking just the world. The universe is better.

So when all money in the world is being transferred through Flatter, we're happy. Just a quick question about how you comply with international financial regulations if you're allowing completely anonymous transactions between people. I mean, aren't you opening yourself up to being used for money laundering and other legal purposes?

Yeah, so we have a license to not have a license. It's not as cool as having a license to kill, but it's almost as cool. There's a regulation in the e-money directive in the European Union saying if you're an agent for money, that you take money from someone and send it to someone else, they are actually sending money between each other so you don't have to know about

who the people are really. So we keep as little information about people as possible because we really believe in privacy. So if it's not too big sums, we don't have to know anything about you. But we are compliant to all laws that we have to because it's also really important to us. One last question.

Just a little bit further on, does that mean you're not going to be cooperating with any international agencies that want to know who's transferring the money and so forth? Well, that depends on who the international agency is. If it's people that don't have jurisdiction, no, we won't comply. But if it's people that have jurisdiction over us, we will have to comply. But we will always be on our user side

and we will always fight for their rights. But if someone is money laundering on the system, that's not really what we built it for. But if they're doing it, that won't really work for them anyhow. So kind of how the system works makes money laundering and all of these things really not very efficient. So we haven't had any real problems with any form of abuse or anything

so far that we know about. Hi. Hi. Just a simple question. Why are you barefoot? You feel awake when you're on stage and I haven't had coffee today, so I always do this when I'm on stage to feel a bit more alert. Down to earth.

No, I'm not down to earth at all, actually. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you very much. A big applause for Mar. You're very welcome.