Alexis Ohanian ( kn0thing on twitter) – the co-founder of reddit (and the creator of the beloved Reddit Alien) was in Mysore for the TED conference. He took a break from the TED conference to meetup with a bunch of redditers. For those who don’t know he is also the publisher of XKCD books and all the proceeds from the book go to building a school in Laos. It was interesting talking to him about startups, startup school, Paul Graham, ycombinator, traveling in India, the startup scene in India, Social media [link to TED Presentation] and of course reddit.

We gave him a sampling of Indian food (Coconut Groove) and sweets (K C Das). Thanks to @dhempe and @pswam for organising this tweetup.

The Kaleva Church and Tampere Cathedral

The Kaleva church has several distinctive features. It is built in the shape of a fish and is extremely minimalistic as it does not have any ornamentation inside (even compared to the typical minimalistic Lutheran churches prevalent in Finland). It can be mistaken for a huge classroom or a concert hall if it were not for the large Organ that is present there. The church is huge and has a volume of about 36,000 cubic metres. Incidentally the guide who was conducting the tour was the daughter-in-law of the architect and she gave an insider’s view of the church. Another unusual feature of the church is the altar and the tall wooden sculpture behind it in the shape of a reed. The interior is mostly exposed concrete while the exterior is white tiled (like scales on fish’s body).

The Tampere cathedral was built in 1907 and is famous for it’s frescoes. The frescoes were painted by renowned symbolist Hugo Simberg. “The Garden of Death” and “The Wounded Angel” are two of the famous frescoes in the Tampere Cathedral. Hugo Simberg’s works depict dark and gloomy worlds. “The Wounded Angel” was voted as the most famous and recognizable painting in the whole of Finland recently. The most controversial of the frescoes is a red-winged serpent on the ceiling of the cathedral which symbolizes corruption and sin. The windows of the cathedral are adorned with beautiful and intricate stained glass paintings. All along the mezzanine floor of the church, you can find the paintings of the 12 apostles of Jesus.

The Wounded Angel	Garden of Death

Viikinsaari island

In the evening, Marek and I went to the Sauna and met some other CSers. We had a CS meeting in the sauna ! After the Sauna and a dip in the Näsijärvi Lake, I left for a trip to the Viikinsaari island on Pyhäjärvi lake. The island is popular with Tampere residents for picnics and weekend getaways. The forest on the island has several art installation in the form of theater props, photos and other artifacts. Angling, barbeque parties, kayaking and horseriding (on Icelandic horses) are popular activities on the island.There are several nature trails including around the island and the western part of the island is a nature reserve.

I did not have many plans in Tampere and had left it open-ended. When I was choosing hosts on CS I was looking for people who were interested in photography. Marek was a good photographer and offered to host me. I was lucky as Marek has two very talented friends – Alexsi and Tuomo who were good photographers too. In the evening, Marek and I went to TUT (Tampere University of Technology) campus where Alexsi was developing photos of their recent trip to Bulgaria and Slovenia. Alexsi was a film photographer and was manually developing the film himself . The film developing process itself is very laborious as you have to soak the film in water and then developer. Then made wet in fixer to fix the image. Finally the film is left to dry. After drying the developed film can be scanned into the computer. Quite a big difference from the digital photography that I am used to.

While Alexsi was developing the film, Marek called another friend, Tuomo who had just bought a couple of flashes and a reflector/diffuser combo (the round diffuser is seen in one of the images below). We moved to the TUT Campus to take some photos. First we shot some photos near a cliff nearby. As the natural light faded, we moved into the campus nearby which had bare concrete walls. Since I had never worked with external flashes, I was initially volunteered as the model. Some of the photos came out faurly stunning. Then we took turns being the cameraman, model and spotboys .The results were fantastic.

Me	Alexsi

The setup for the photo session is shown below with one flash getting triggered from above and one from the side onto the diffuser to cast soft light on the subject. We kept adjusting the intensity and the distance until we could perfect the light setup. The inspiration for this was the strobist blog. Do read it if you are interested in flash photography.

Art of the Start

The star speaker and the crowd-puller was definitely Guy Kawasaki – The author of “Art of the Start” and “Reality Check”. He kept the audience engaged throughout the talk. I am not sure how much of the advice that he gave can be used for startups other than web/cloud startups. The slides of his talk are embedded below.

Krishna – Arjuna session

This session was moderated by Sanjay Anandram. This session explored the relationship between Krishna (The Advisor) and Arjuna (The Entrepreneur) fighting together to build and sell a product in the market (Kurukshetra). The discussion ranged from how to choose a mentor, to compensation issues (longer term equity or transactional) to having star advisor to advisors who give meaningful advice. It was a good interactive session and it was nice to hear both sides of the story as there were advisors as well as entrepreneurs present in the session.

Writing a business plan

I could not attend writing a business plan by Naeem Zafar but I heard it was good from other people. I have embedded the slides of the talk below:

Building global consumer businesses out of India

This was one of the best sessions in NASSCOM PC. Pallav Nandhani, CTO of Infosoft Global (which sells Fusion Charts). He started the business from his home on Kolkata and was initially the sole developer. He uses the FOSS model and licenses the penultimate version of his software under MIT and GPLv3 licenses. He used this to build credibility about his product as the market for charting software is highly fragmented. Also making the software fended off competition from the lower end of the market while at the same time reducing the cost of acquisition and trail to near zero. Pallav started the business when he was 17 ! A very inspiring story and he build his business while breaking several rules of conventional wisdom for startups. K Ganesh of Tutorvista spoke next and his business model was unusual as well. Tutorvista provides online tutoring to students across 28 countries. All the teachers that tutor students are located across India. How serial entrepreneur K Ganesh overcame challenges of infrastructure (power, computers and internet access) was fascinating. Also all the marketing was done online by deploying over 100,000 keywords using google adwords. They are one of the largest online ad spenders in India. The next speaker was Amit Ranjan of Slideshare. He spoke how he started and grew the company. An inspiration for Slideshare was youtube as it made embedding and sharing really easy and he had designed slideshare from ground up based on this thought process.

Technology opportunities for serving millions of Indians

This session was moderated by Ramesh Ramanathan of Janaagraha. He spoke about the lessons learned from his microfinance firm Janalakshmi. Sean Blagsvedt of Babajobs also shared some insight on the challenges he faced when building the business. Babajobs use technology to help people at the bottom of the pyramid find jobs. Their target market contains people such as drivers, maids, security personnel and cooks. Babajobs found that on average by harnessing technology to provide better matching these people were able to earn more while commuting less. This leads to getting more money into the hands of these people which means more buying power in the longer run. Sudhakar V -of Co-options works with farmers at an aggregate level (via co-operatives) providing them loans at better rates. V Rajashekar also talked about the e-choupal initiative which is very successful and how it is helping rural development. The e-choupal platform can be used to provide various services to farmers thus tapping the rural potential which so far has been untapped.

Startup ecosystem enablers

This discussion brought all of the ecosystem enabler together and brought forth some of the typical problems that entrepreneurs face and how to solve them. The topics that were most interesting is how to help the entrepreneur to take an idea and commercialize it and what are the gaps in the current ecosystem that are stopping it. Students today are aware of entrepreneurship as a career avenue unlike earlier but challenges remain such as peer pressure and the Indian social system that dissuades people from taking risk at a point when the can do it most easily (as you have very less to lose). Another fact was that unlike the silicon valley (which serves as a model for tech startups in India for better or worse), professors are not educated about possibilities for commercializing research unlike Stanford and other universities in the valley. Rosen Sharma of Mentor Partners gave the example of how John Hennessy encouraged students to start companies. Yahoo, Google and Granite systems were some of the companies that were founded when Rosen was studying in Stanford. This perhaps harks back to the deeply entrenched caste system in India where learning as a means (Brahmins) has higher social value than business (Vaishyas).

Overall it was a great conference as I got to meet several people who I knew only through mailing lists and other social media. I also felt that it was more of a startup conference rather than a product conference but that bias could be because I was selecting sessions based on speakers (mostly from startups) that I wanted to listen and interact with. Another probable reason is all the big mature IT companies in India are pursuing the services path and only now are people looking at starting product companies.

The Old Tourist office	Tammerkoski Pedestrian Bridge

Tampere is the most populous inland city amongst the Nordic countries. It is located between two lakes, Näsijärvi and Pyhäjärvi. Once you look at the location it is easy to understand why. There is a difference in the water levels of the lakes (18 metres). The lakes are connected by the Tammerkoski rapids. For several hundred years, the rapids have powered the industries of Tampere and made it the “Manchester of the North”. Tampere is a city in transition now. Lot of the old industries such as Finlayson are been converted into malls, shopping centers, theaters and living quarters. It is strange to live in one of these living quarters as wall ceilings are fairly high as these housed heavy machinery earlier.

Another thing that Tampere is known for are the cartoon characters known as Mommins. The Moomins are the central characters in a series of books and a comic strip by Finnish illustrator and writer Tove Jansson. They are a family of trolls who are white and roundish and resemble hippopotamuses. The carefree and adventurous family live in their house in Moominvalley, in the forests of Finland. Other than the Nordic countries, they are extremely popular in Japan. In fact, several couples travel all the way fro Japan to Tampere to get married in the Moominvalley museum. Unfortunately due to lack of time, I could not go to the Moominvalley museum.

Something characteristic about Tampere is the Finnish dialect. There is a emphasis on the ‘L’, ‘M’, ‘N’ and ‘P’. To add to the fun there is the trilling ‘R’. It is fun just to try to talk in Finnish and try to pronounce the names. It is almost musical. What most people are unaware of is that Finnish belongs to the Finno-Ugric language family and is not related to Swedish, Norwegian or Danish – the language spoken in other Nordic Countries. It is related to Estonian which belongs to the same family of languages.

An post about Tampere would be incomplete without the mention of (in)famous Black Sausage (Mustamakkara). It is made by mixing pork, pig blood, crushed rye and flour, after which it is stuffed into the intestines of an animal like most sausages. There are several shops near the Tammerkoski that sell it. But I did not have have the courage to try it out. You can see how it looks like here.

Trip to Ruissalo

When I reached Turku, I realised that I was probably missing one of the best parts of Turku – The archipelago. The Turku Archipelago is connected by ferries and in some cases by bridges. Cycling around the archipelago is a popular activity for travelers. I had passed through the archipelago on the Saturday morning on the journey from Stockholm to Turku. After talking to TS, we decided that we will go to Ruissalo as it was one of the islands that was connected to the mainland with the help of the bridge. So we took the bus and reached the island. The sunset was fabulous and we saw several anglers who were fishing in the tranquility of the place. It had just rained and the soil was wet. On the way to the bus I saw a bunch of bluebell plants by the roadside. The photo of blue bells was taken in a hurry when rushing back for the last bus off the island. It is one of my favorite photos taken during the trip.

Aboa Vetus and Ars Nova

Aboa Vetus and Ars Nova was one of the most unique museums I have seen during this trip. During the medieval times Finland was a part of Sweden. Aboa Vetus (Latin: “Old Turku”) display portions of the city during those times. At the site of the museum, there was a huge find of bones (both human and animal) which is on display now. Aboa Vetus is located in the basement of the museum and the other section of the museum which showcases contemporary art is located on a higher level. Ars Nova (Latin: “New Art”) displays changing exhibitions of contemporary art. Ars Nova hosts the European Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary Art every alternate odd-numbered year. So in a single building you can see the excavated part of medieval Turku in Aboa Vetus as well as the contemporary art in Ars Nova. It is one of the most popular attractions of the region.

The Turku castle was built in 1280 and has served as a bastion and administrative center in Finland. There are several floors in this medieval caste which were built successively during different eras. The lower floors were built in the middle ages and retain the medieval feel and are mostly unadorned. The higher floors were built during castle expansion in the renaissance period and are decorated in the style of that era. The Turku Castle had a large moat adjoining the Aura river during the middle ages to protect it against attacks but it no longer exists. The Castle serves as a backdrop for numerous medieval reenactments.

Turku Castle	Turku Castle Bailey
Medieval Graffiti	Castle Windows

The Cathedral and Night photography in Turku

The Turku Cathedral is in the center of the city and the attractive and high cathedral Steeple can be seen from around the city. The Turku Cathedral is one of the most important Churches in Finland and is considered a national shrine and symbol of Turku. It is more than 7 centuries old.

I was lugging around a tripod during this trip as I wanted to do some night photography so TS and I decided to venture out during the night to take some photos of the Cathedral and the Aura river nearby. There were quite a lot of people during the night as there was “Down by the Laituri” rock festival happening on the banks of the Aura river. So we set our tripods, moved from place to place and clicked

The Aura River at night	View from TS’s Home

Turku is a city in southwest finland. It was the capital of Finland from 1300s till 1812, when the Russians moved the capital to Helsinki. Today Turku (pop 175 000) is the third largest city in Finland after Helsinki and Tampere. Before independence in 1917, Finland was a part of the Swedish empire (from the 12th -19th Century) and thereafter the Russian Empire (1809 onwards). The traces of this can be seen in the culture in many places. From the stark and cold Russian statues in some of the parks to Swedish being the second official language of Finland. Government officials are expected to answers queries in Swedish and it is a requirement that they know the language. As Turku is close to the Sweden, there is a significant minority of Swedes living in Turku. [ Linus Torvalds was also from this minority community though he was born in Helsinki ]. I was staying with a Couchsurfing (CS) friend TS at Turku.

I found Turku to a very interesting and quirky city dominated by the Aura River which runs through the city centre and it’s medieval past symbolized by the majestic Turku cathedral and Castle. Some of the quirky things that I saw

Fibonacci sequence on Chimney of Turku Energia

If you look carefully at the picture below [Larger version with complete building] , there is a fibonacci sequence (1,1,2,3,5,11,.. – The next number is the sequence is generated by adding the last two numbers in the sequence) in neon signs on the Chimney of the Turku Energia building. I was not able to find out why.

Chilli Sauces

Saw this in the supermarket. Read from left to right – Original Death, Mega Death, Pure Death and Sudden Death. [Larger Version]. On the Cover it says “Feel Alive” and “World famous dangling skull included in box”

The Mermaid’s tail

There was this beautiful mermaid’s tail in the Aura river near the shipbuilding yard. Must have a story to it.

Hearts in the Aura

There were bright-red Hearts scattered in the Aura river.

There are many palaces around Stockholm – Sweden historically being one of the powerful states in Scandinavia. I just blogged about Drottninghom palace where the royal family currently stays. The Royal Palace (Kungliga Slottet) is the official residence of the royal family and the changing of the royal guards takes place here. From June to August the changing of the Royal Guards with a military band takes pace in the outer courtyard of the Palace at 12:15 hours. Right at the stroke of 12 at noon, the guards who are positioned at the gates and the entrances come together and stand in the formation. The only exception to these are the guards to the entrances where the guards can rest and change.

There is an announcer who explains the significance of the ceremony and narrates the history of the royal guards which is one of the oldest regiments of the Swedish Army. Then the guards who are going to replace the current bunch march to the palace and then salute them. Both of them then stand side by side as one by one the guards in earlier duty are relieved as new guards replace them.

Meanwhile the military band enters the scene from one of the side entrance to the palace and this is the high point of the ceremony as the military band plays traditional Swedish music, classical music from masters such as Mozart and Vivaldi and even popular music from bands such as ABBA and musicals. It is a precision display and very well liked by the crowd as can be seen from the cheering that follows every song. For me, it was one of the high-points of visiting Stockholm. Best of all it is free, though they charge you to see the palace museums (There are three museums in the palace complex).

Back of the IETF 75 T-shirt featuring the Vasa (Parody of the ISO Model)

The Vasamuseet (”Vasa Museum”) is a maritime museum located on the island of Djurgården which displays the only almost fully intact 17th century ship that has ever been salvaged. The Vasa sank on her maiden voyage in 1628, just like the Titanic. The difference was that Vasa sank even before it could leave the Stockholm harbour.

Political decision leads to Engineering failure

The Swedish King Gustavus Adolphus ordered the construction of the Vasa and was impatient to see the completion of the ship so that it could join the Thirty years war with Poland. In doing so, several poor engineering decisions were made to satisfy the king as no one wanted to incur his ire by pointing out the several design blunders. The 64-gun upper deck of the Vasa was not offset by the ballast and it made the ship unstable as it was top-heavy. The Vasa was initially designed to have only one gundeck but it ended up with two adding to further instability of the ship (feature creep existed in the middle ages ). Also there was no way to estimate scientifically the stability of the ship and it all depended on the experience of the shipbuilder leading to the sinking of many ships and wasted effort (Software estimation still isn’t good enough – We are stuck in the middle ages of software development ).

The Catastrophic Maiden Voyage

On 10 August 1628, the Vasa to set sail on her maiden voyage to the naval station at Älvsnabben. It was a bright calm sunny day. There was only a light breeze blowing across the sea. At the first hint of the gust the Vasa swerved but was stabilized by the sailors aboard. Soon another gust of wind followed but this was fatal as the tilting of the ship caused the water to rush through the open lower gun ports which added to the instability of the ship and the eventual sinking of the Vasa. As the Vasa was an extraordinary ship, there were thousands of people who were present to witness the maiden voyage including ambassadors of different countries. The Vasa sank ingloriously in front of the gathered crowd.

The bronze cannons of the ship were salvaged in the 17th Century but the Vasa was forgotten till the 1960s when the ship was salvaged from the bottom of the sea in a major operation.