Vinayak Hegde

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.

I had an opportunity to go to the NASSCOM Product Conclave held at Lalit Ashok, Bangalore on October 27, 28th as a representative of the Headstart.

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 next destination after Turku in Finland was the industrial city of Tampere. Tampere, Turku and Helsinki are almost equidistant from each other and are well connected by train network (with trains running every hour during the day). After I arrived in Tampere, I met my couchsurfing host MM at the train station who was hosting another guy who was hitchhiking around Europe. I was not carrying any guidebook for Scandinavia so we went to the tourist information center to pick up brochures and maps. Much of my stay in Tampere was unplanned and it turned out to be a good thing. MM gave me a tour of the city. The city centre is compact and can be traversed on foot.

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 Castle

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