Stockholm Syndrome: Nah, not bad after all

I am officially done with my seventh semester in NUS (although grades present a whole new meaning for the word “official”), and its been quite interesting 4 months – getting back to old friends, making new friends, trying to balance work and studies, roaming around in the streets of Clarke Quay – its not so bad to be in Singapore after all, quite contrary to what I felt when I took the flight out of Stockholm. The stress level is definitely higher in this life style compared to the European one, and the people are little bit caught in the details, yet I think if one can hold on and continue to do cool things, the place offers a lot of interesting things for you.  

The people who I met and spent time with in Stockholm have been the highlight of my whole overseas experience, and I realize that finding the right groups of people in whatever settings can still kick things in the head, and make you enjoy the present. Cliche, but true, so true that its been an amazing 100 odd days so far, catching up with the crowd, and finding new things to do. 

Facebook Garage – Stockholm, here we come (LIVE – At least trying)

Nordic’s first Facebook Garage!

So the action began a bit late (as usual). Well one lesson here – NO events on a Friday but when you don’t have a choice, at least make sure that it is not before 17:00. Anyways, we are good to go!

And it started off with an introduction by myself on behalf of the organizers about the event, the information about the wireless networks, the event wiki, the flickr page, the jaiku account and the rationale behind the idea of throwing this event. Beata the moderator was then introduced and she being the charismatic queen of Sweden took the stage by storm with a very precise introduction about the event and some small stuff that I had forgotten in my speech. She is the real rock star of the event:)

Facebook Garage – Stockholm’s first

Well its been pretty long since I blogged, 50 days to be precise.But hey hold on! I have damn good exciting news to share. We at nuStart are putting together another event this Friday called Facebook Garage – Stockholm’s first.

Facebook Garage is a global concept that is held in different parts of the world, across continents, across timezones! The event has been held more as a developer garage focussing on developing applications and monetizing them. In short the focus was more for developers / coders / geeks. But we wanted it to focus on both the worlds – developing applications and business models that are emerging through such communities. And we think we have a pretty neat well rounded set of speakers ranging from the folks who created the pink ribbon campaign for breast cancer to a Swedish – US based VC talking about business models that are emerging and what kind of frameworks to look out for.

Facebook finally cleans it up

Finally today Facebook decided that it is high time that they give their users a clean up tool to take away their “digital shit” but at the same time not deprive the freedom to add all kinds of non-sense into their profile pages. My friend had blogged about how these facebook applications are attacking everyone’s profile making simple actions more tedious and time consuming. This is the picture of someone’s profile cluttered with all kinds of applications. Now this is quite a profile sidebar isn’t it?

theFacebook what?

I read this splendid article about how the concept behind facebook was actually conceptualized by a team of 3 who wanted Mark Zuckerberg (the founder of facebook) to finish the last bit of coding for their venture only to be screwed and back stabbed in a very bad way. The trio who named their project Harvard Connections wanted the idea to be something that connects all the Harvard students so that they can hang out online and get to each other better. As the article says, in web based tech ventures, the success is all about execution and not about the idea itself. The idea although was nothing splendid or different from the existing ones, the differentiation was in the design (simplicity) and usability (intuitiveness). The founders wanted a “geek” to finish the final leg of the project so that their idea was good to go. The geek happened to be Zuckerberg who managed to “steal” the idea totally and launched “thefacebook”.