How are they so good yet so chilled?

I look at the Swedes / Scandinavians and my god they impress me. They are so chilled, have time to be fit, play and party yet find the niche they are so good at. They take more time than an average Asian probably to be tech savvy and be glued to things online, but when they do, they excel at it I think. The programmers are great minds, the business developers think international and they do not have inhibitions in sticking their neck out and trying new things. They have no problem even if it has not been proven too much, and the best thing is there is no age barrier in their minds. There are people who are nearing 50 but still have no problems in trying out something new and starting from the scratch. May be the social / welfare system is turned to the positive side of things for these dudes, but I think its great lifestyle. And more so, they conjure up enough “offline skills” too, from repairing the boats, fishing, learning to build those houses, repairing the clogs in the pipe… they are much more rounded and diverse. So for me, I plan to continue doing things online, but also start spending more time offline and learning new hand skills. Let us see how it goes.

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.

Biz Buzz Review

Yesterday there was an inter college business case competition organized by the folks from Singapore in Stanford. My previous post gives you information about the competition itself. Our team from Sweden won a prize in this competition.

The challenge

Zazzle as a company although was making revenue wanted to tap into the student market more effectively as they knew that it was the youngsters who loved to express their emotions and be as creative as they wish to be. However, Zazzle neither spent time, resource or money in focusing on the student market and knew that a normal “advertisement” campaign or a facebook application might not fetch the actual numbers that they wanted. It was clear that the market existed amongst students as students in the US alone represented a spending power of close to 180B USD and as mentioned before, these youngsters are never afraid to express themselves through bold / funny statements. So the case wanted the teams to come up with solutions that could help market Zazzle amongst the students, promote Zazzle as a cool & creative hang out spot on the internet & thereby generate a better brand awareness.

Our idea