This is the blog of Oscar Karlsten. I’m an online media and marketing professional born in 1980 north of Stockholm, Sweden. For the past years I’ve been studying, working, and living abroad. In late 2009, I finally made my way back to Stockholm again. My blog in its current form as Oscar and Friends has its roots in Australia, even though I’ve been a frequent blogger on and off since 1998. Because of the service I used at the time, one of my friends was kind enough to give me the nickname CJB.NET, quite catchy. You can get an overview of what I’m up to in my lifestream.

One of my first loves was the Internet and every opportunity that comes with it. After pursuing a short-lived ‘career’ as an ASCII art artist – I quickly realized (maybe not quick enough) that the real opportunity was in sharing ideas, creativity, and working without borders.

After pursuing a career as a webmaster and on different web-projects as well as completing my degrees, I eventually ended up with Google. At Google I worked with building and developing strategic partnerships for AdSense in the Nordic region at first. I worked mainly with the big publishing houses and entrepreneurs (but also various ‘comparison sites’) to maximize revenue, both for them and Google. After about a year or so I felt it was time to move on internally and pursued a new challenge as a Product Specialist (still with AdSense). My main mission and goal here was to collaborate with engineering and product management to develop and launch AdSense products. I also spent a lot of time developing and executing on operations support plan. As you can imagine, there’s a lot of people that needs to be briefed upon a launch in an organization such as Google’s.

As I mentioned I moved back to Sweden in 2009 and I’m now the CEO of Avantime Group AB (Avantime AB), a full-service agency with about 50 employees located in Stockholm, Sweden. We do all sorts of work driven by our excellent employees within four business areas; Management, Marketing, Creative and Development. What we mainly do for food on the table includes (but is not limited to): Digitally focused business- and concept development, websites based on EPiServer CMS or WordPress, intranets based on Microsoft SharePoint, marketing campaigns and execution plans, iPhone- and Android apps and so on.

Anyway, enough on that topic. If you wish to have a look at what I’ve been up to professionally in the past, please take a look at my CV on LinkedIn.

Thanks for stopping by!