The Philosophy

The philosophy of Vidar Andersen’s blacktar.com has always been very simple; Software and technology should work for YOU – Not the other way around. It’s not about technology – It’s about people. Listen very carefully to your customers – and their customers. Engage in humble conversation and learn, learn, learn.

We strive to make a difference by being genuinely interested in you and your situation. Our reliability, the trust gained, your satisfaction with the end result – and your experience getting there – is how we define and measure success.

We strongly support open standards, interoperability and Open Source Software.

The Founder

Vidar Andersen started out in Norway as a Film Science Major hopeful, dropping out in late 1996 to plunge head first into the then relatively un-chartered territory of The World Wide Web with the founding of blacktar.com at the start of 1997.

He’s logged over 20.000 hours of flight time in all sorts of web/Interenet based software projects, from eLearning, edutainment, eCommerce, intranets, extranets, portals, and content management systems (CMS), CRM, ERP and other TLAs to gaming, custom web-based applications, digital marketing, Social Media and Mobile Apps.

Vidar is very grateful to have been privileged to work with a broad range of customers; from large nationals to multinational enterprises, NGOs, governments, GOs and global iconic brands.

Between 1999 and 2001 Vidar co-founded the popular open source and enterprise grade content management system Plone together with Alan Runyan and Alexander Limi. Users of Plone include NASA JPL, The CIA, The FBI, Lufthansa, eBay, Deutsche Telekom, The Government of Brazil, College University London, Yale University, Oxfam et al.

In 2010 Vidar founded the Social Media Lunch Cologne, a regular event where Social Media experts and newbies alike meet, eat, share and learn; A platform aiming to stimulate the discourse on Social Media in the region and connecting people with similar interests.

In 2011 he founded the Hacker News Cologne Meetup, to help bring together technology and business hackers interested in startups, challenging the status quo, poking the box, building new stuff and learning from each other in the process; The regular meetup aims to connect the local tech and biz scene and bridge it with the world outside.

In 2011 he co-founded “Gauss – The People Magnet”: http://getGauss.com - because he believes we’re living in a network economy, not an knowledge or information economy anymore – and everybody should have the chance to be well connected.

In 2012 he decided to help bring Startup Weekend to Cologne as a way to give back to the local startup scene and put the spotlight nationally and internationally on the amazing up and rising Startup scene in Cologne and also became an instructor for Startup Weekend NEXT Cologne to help create more capable entrepreneurs in the region.

In 2013 he was named one of the top 5 must-know people in the German startup scene and invited to Stanford to receive training from Steve Blank and become an official instructor of the “Lean Launchpad” premium startup educational curriculum taught at e.g. Stanford, Berkley and Colombia.

Vidar maintains a sporadic personal soapbox at http://stopmebeforeiblogagain.com and twitters at http://twitter.com/blacktar and is quite the sociable geek on Facebook http://facebook.com/Blacktar and LinkedIn.