It all started in the mid-19th century, in 1865 to be precise. Although almost everyone today recognizes Nokia as one of the world’s leading high-tech companies, it has not always been that. However, it is true that at the time when they were making other things than mobile phones, one could argue that Nokia was riding the then current technology wave. But world was a much bigger place back then. And over the years Nokia has been producing a whole range of products, some of which one might not even associate with it.

Nokia started out in the communication industry of the day - paper industry. As a paper manufacturer Nokia wood mills was producing the whole paper range from news paper to toilet paper. I don’t know exactly when they have ceased the toilet paper production, but it is not uncommon even today to spot around Finland paper towel dispensers and toilet paper holders bearing the company’s name. And it was actually those that startled me and I wanted to learn more about the history of Nokia.

However, a nearby Finnish Rubber Works factory acquired Nokia paper factory and the joint venture went on to use the name Nokia as a brand name. During this paper-rubber period on the rubber part of the venture Nokia has been producing a variety of rubber products. Already then one of the biggest customers was in the defence as Nokia was producing rubber items for the military. However, their line of products spawned from tires to rubber boots which they still manufacture today.

And rubber boots are an extremely handy item in this swampy land. They are, however, often worn as a fashion statement too as they do come in bright yellow and pink colors, along with the traditional black. Interesting enough, the decision to make bright-colored rubber boots came in the mid-20th century and was an intentional fashion move. Nokia’s rubber boots were up until this year hand-made right here in Finland (now the company has moved its rubber boot production overseas).

Then came the era of electricity. After World War I the rubber and paper Nokia acquired the Finnish Cable Works. One could speculate that the move was made as clever executives forsaw what electricity might bring along. Before the Finnish Cable Works was established in 1912 all telegraph, electricity and telephone lines were manufactured of imported materials. The company’s executives obviously figured out that they could make money off of it and Nokia started manufacturing all kinds of electrical cables. That importantly inlcuded even specializing in underwater cables production, an operation which put Nokia on a global map.

A big remnant of the cable era is the still standing, but now utilized for other purposes, Kaapelitehdas (the cable factory) in Helsinki. The now defunct factory now owned by the city of Helsinki serves as a friendly host to the whole range of cultural institutions, galleries, artists’ ateliers and small businesses. Due to the self-initiative of Kaapelitehdas early residents, it is viewed as a model of transforming abandoned industrial premises into an important cultural center.

By allowing the Kaapelitehdas to be taken over by the cultural sphere Nokia definitely made an excellent move. One could not say equally so about their Connect to Art digital arts project which is all shiny and sparkling on the surface, but is based on a flawed concept equating the traditional and digital arts. When you scratch the surface of Connect to Art is almost immediately becomes obvious that it’s rather a clever marketing stunt than a project made to support art.

Fast-forward to the last decade of the 20th century. It was only in the 1990s that Nokia almost entirely shifted its focus to the making of mobile phones and mobile network equipment. Although it’s mobile operations date back into 1960s when Nokia again got an order from the miliatry to develop mobile communications network.

It is rather amusing to look at those early attempts at mobile communications. Nokia’s early commercial mobile phones were literaly the size of a small portable fridge. And I’m not talking about the 60s here, this was in the 1991 and the portable fridge size phone was the first GSM phone. I have no idea how many were made and how many sold, but I am sure that they sold a few as the development of the technology did go on. Now that first GSM phone is on display in the Media Museum in Tampere.

(Although the first hand-portable phone, as the like to call them, was an NMT Nokia Cityman placed on the market in the distant 1987. Hm, after seeing the first GSM model it makes me wonder how big the Cityman was and who the hell carried that around. Check out that first GSM in the gallery.)

In fact, those and later phones became so popular that only a few years after Nokia begun making mobile phones, they could not meet the demand and the company almost collapsed as they were striving to supply the much belowed kännykät (a term for mobile phone cleverly implanted by Nokia’s marketing department which is still used in the Finnish slang).

Today Nokia is a company that is best known as a mobile phone innovator and manufacturer. It operates ten manufacturing plants around the globe and employs almost 70.000 people. And indeed Nokia is the world leader in production and sales of mobile phones. Nokia churns out an amazing 900.000 mobile phones every single day and has, as a lesson learned from the near collapse in the 1995, developed one of the most sophisticated supply chain systems. Supposedly it is this knowledge that keeps Nokia ahead of its competitors.

What at first might sound a bit odd, that the forefathers of this mobile phone manufacturer have gone from producing toilet paper, to rubber, to cables, was actually an excellent set of decisions made by the owners. The leaders of Nokia have not feared to take daring steps and diversify their business - it kept them afloat and ahead of their time as the company has become a trendsetter. So, no wonder that Nokia is today seen as a high-tech wonder and a silver bullet for the not so long ago stagnating Finnish economy.

And it all started in a small town of Nokia in central Finland where a part of this global goliath still operates today. Quite a joruney.

Greetings from Nokia.

Mladen

Before I get to this week’s topic a brief update on previous week’s writing. First of all, the smoke situation is hardly getting any better. Some days it’s really bad. On Monday the smoke in Helsinki made the city look like it’s covered in fog. I’ve read in today’s papers that a garbage dump is on fire near Viipuri in Russia. Great.

But drinking and drowning even tickeled your fingers and I’ve received a few emails. Most of you thought it’s quite tragic, but nevertheless found it to be amusing. According to statistic which has been kept since at least 1990, when the air temperature rises a single degree, the amount of deaths caused by drowning rises by seven. This year alone, as of mid-August, 82 people have died. I vote for cold and sunny weather.

Now let’s move on to business.

Getting rich on the stock market is so late 90’s. Selling Microsoft, buying Google? Get a life. What’s hot and hip now is getting loaded on the commodity markets. Stop following the London Gold Fixing twice a day and forget about oil. The bullion of the future lies in plastic, glass and aluminum. And there ain’t any better place to get rich by trading these right here, in Finland. No provisions, no taxes, pure hard Euros.

Why don’t I just keep my mouth shut and get filthy rich? Now, I sure thought about this too. But, I’ve gathered that most of you live some place else, and then again, I thought, there’s plenty of room for high profits for all those whomever decide to move here. Interested?

At the moment especially aluminum is highly profitable and there’s nothing to lose, thus no need for any day trading skills whatsoever. And the best part is that the market is still in the expansion phase. The aluminum market alone will grow more than 15 million Euros next year. Think about it, all this cash might be mine. Excited? I sure am, but unfortunately it ain’t as easy as it sounds since the competition is, well, quite competitive (and there are other hidden traps I’ll reveal later).

An ounce of aluminum is worth 0,30€ (10,58/kg). OK, not that much, I hear you saying, for a metal that is light and hard to get. But what if I tell you that you can find aluminum at that price laying around all over Finland (especially in the summer in populated areas) in the form of cans. That’s right, after consuming their favorite beverage 99% of consumers politely place their canisters onto a curb or on top of a trash bin for others to collect. And you can cash in each can at 0,15€ in any practically any grocery store. Yes, these people do pay for what you then collect.

And the best part is that when you collect the money, you also collect the 22% VAT that someone else paid to the state. And guess what, the same goes for almost all plastic and glass beverage bottles. Quite nifty I say.

Although everything seems really simple when you do the calculations on your napkin, it is a tad bit different when you’re on the streets trying to realize your well crafted business plan. First of all you’re not the only one who thought about doing the same thing. Which means that you have to have sharp vision and be agile. Then you have to know where people drink and at what time of the day. Because if you’re five minutes late, you’re late and, bang, the treasure has been already collected by the tölkkimummo (or the “can grandma” as they are called around here). Capitalism and communism all in one; I can see Marx and Weber in ecstasy. And then there’s the butterfly effect: if the weather turns sour, so will your profits.

In spite of the huge opportunity to get wealthy waiting for you to come and get it, you have to do your homework first. Here are some tips from the experienced tölkki collector:
- begin running and learn how to snatch;
- eat lots of carrots for sharper vision and get night-vision goggles for the night shifts in the spring and fall seasons;
- survey the hood, even better, acquaint yourself with the whole city;
- learn where the teenagers hang out;
- carry lots of large disposable plastic bags;
- if you see lots of goods, run for the most valuable ones first, i.e. cans and plastic bottles, pick glass bottles last;
- get a bike;
- do not fear tölkkimummot, rather befriend them, they can be real comrades when not on duty.

If you want to make a living in Finland, you probably won’t make it, but you can make a decent amount of money without much effort (as in pocket money). I’ve decided to jump into the commodity market for a month and give it a shot. Here’s the outcome. I worked 15 hours during that month and earned 55€, which translates into 3,6€/hour. Bad? Depends! In Slovenia one is usually offered only a few cans’ worth more for jobs that demand exponentially more skills, challenges, responsibilities and intellectual agility. So, if you live there, forget about that lousy job at a software company coding your eyes away and come here and collect cans for the summer and earn something. But if you’re a Finn, well, then the job is not really in the upper earning scale and you might want to get a job.

May the harvest be plentiful, tölkkimummot of Finland.

Mladen

Summer months in Finland have been unusually warm this year. While the temperature hovers around 25°C, which I really don’t find to be exceptionally warm, there’s been practically no rain in almost two months. Which does feel rather unusual. Anyway, the country has been going through the driest period in the last hundred years. As a consequence both farmers and firefighters have been struggling to get a grip on nature. And to get a grip on neighboring country’s politics.

Naturally the weather does not end at any political borders. Thus at least north-western part of Russia has been going through the same drought that’s present in Finland. While Finnish firefighters are trying to stay ahead of the nature and are diligently putting out fires, their Russian counterparts are doing very little while facing the same kind of fires.

The fires have in the last few weeks reached such size and strength that smoke has covered pretty much the whole central and southern Finland. It doesn’t take a super sensitive person in, for instance, Helsinki to sniff out that something is burning and quite intensely too. Not to mention that the very same smoke can also be clearly seen as a strong yellowish haze.

OK, one can understand, fires can get big and out of hand making them difficult to put out. But how did they get to such proportions in Russia? They simply did not bother to put them out. Supposedly they started doing something about the problem only after being tapped on the shoulder by the Finnish government. And even when Finnish firefighters have crossed the border to help their comrades, they were sent back home and told not to come back. Unbelievable.

However, the nice weather also has other persistent consequences which are endemic over here. I need not point out again that Finland is the country of thousands of lakes and that when the weather heats up people flock to any kind of water to cool off (read at least the previous week’s post for more details, if you haven’t yet). Combining the water and people is perfectly fine, but adding alcohol to the mixture causes nothing but trouble.

Why? I guess that’s obvious: people drown easily. How? Now, that’s a different story, several actually. The weather is nice, the water refreshing, booze flows in streams, life couldn’t be sweeter. Then problems materialize, seemingly out of nowhere. The obvious deadly combination is that the drunk person decides to go for a swim … and they return only after being pulled out the next day by the too often too late rescue crew.

The less obvious way of drowning, but equally common (if not even the most common) is that they decide to either go fishing or rowing on a, let’s get this straight, placid lake. They climb into a boat with an extra bottle of Koskenkorva (which by the way, literally means “an area by the rapids” - the name that could hardly be more appropriate for the occasion) or other favorite kind of booze and dip paddles into the water. Sooner or later the bladder gets full. It desperately needs to be emptied. He stands up, opens the zipper, wobbles for a bit and oops … capsizes the boat. Pretty much a death sentence.

Bingeing turns into tragedy … and statistic according to which during the summer most men by far drown in lakes with their zippers wide open. And the nicer the weather the more of them there is. Which, if one thinks a bit, is quite sad. Maybe it’s about time the weather turns cold and rainy after all.

Urinate responsibly my friends.

Mladen

Every Finn has two homes. The first always close to their working place where they spend most of their time. Most often an apartment in an urban area. While their second home is their kesämökki (or summer cottage) which must stand in the midst of the forest and close by a lake. As mökki (as it is often called) is a place off work, quite naturally, most spend as much time as they can afford there. It is at the mökki where they try to get away from their everyday routines. The essence of life at the summer cottage is not to do anything more significant than relaxing. And they are rather good at doing exactly this.

Almost every summer cottage is at first just a hut with a sauna; sauna is the most important thing. There is no mökki without the sauna, or to put it another way around, if the kesamökki does not have sauna it is simply not a kesämökki. And the sauna is used just like it was in the old days: it is the place for maintaining personal hygiene and as a source of hot water. While a nearby lake is used for getting the water for creating humidity in the hot room and as a place to cool off between the sauna sessions. Hours at a time are spent here.

Once sauna is in place only then gradually other facilities are developed nearby: a grill place for cooking, a dock for easier access to the lake and a small hut for sleeping. Whenever possible, these are never too close to one another, as Finns are people who do appreciate having a lot of space around them.

Although mökki is a place for relaxation, it is itself also a never-ending project as there is always something that is either in need of building, repairing or at least painting. However, most of the time spent at the mökki is used for nothing else but eating, drinking, sauna and resting.

The preparations for the visit to the summer cottage include an extensive shopping for groceries. Amounts of food and drinks consumed at the cottage are simply incredible. Thinking about spent time there quite often brings recollections no other but of eating and drinking from getting up until going to bed.

But as easy as it might seem, spending time at the mökki might not be that calming for the faint hearted. In the kesamökki there’s no electricity, no running water, no sewer, no nothing. Whereas these conditions don’t rise any brows around here, I cannot really imagine that a central European family could and in fact would choose to spend their holidays by candles in the dark, washing themselves in the lake and taking a dump behind a tree. Circumstances which Finns might not even regard as worth thinking about seem rather harsh even for their geographically close neighbors Swedes. (I don’t know where Russians stand on this.)

There’s another specialty of Finns’ summer cottages which is particularly dear to me. Mökit are real time capsules. No, they don’t bury anything. They are too practical for such stupidities. Mökki owners bring to their cottages all the stuff they don’t need anymore anywhere else (or didn’t want in the first place, such as are, for instance, ugly and useless gifts). Mökki hence becomes a living home decoration and fashion time capsule.

If you ever befriend a Finn and they invite you to their kesämökki, don’t even think about not accepting the invitation. If you happen to live in the city, mökki experience will most likely be the closest you’ll ever get to living like Grizzly Adams, ever.

Check out some new images in the gallery and enjoy your summer.

Mladen

I’ve moved to Helsinki for a few months and this has opened a whole new opportunity to thoroughly explore the southern part of Finland. Visiting a place for a few days is always nice, but it’s quite hard to get to know it better during a short period of time. But staying somewhere for a longer time lets one do more that just scratch the surface.

For a country so far in the north it’s not hard to figure out that the southern part was populated first and is still the most populous area. Depending on your perspective, this, however, does not also mean that the most interesting things happen in the most populous areas. But here, I’d have to say that this is the case.

For most of its history Finland has been juggled between its two rather powerful neighbours: Sweden and Russia. And it has been under the rule of either one of the two until 1917 when its people have finally managed to claim their independence (see Itsenäisyyspäivä or the Blue and White Day). The time spent under the rule and strong influence of other societies and their values for such a long time has left rather strong influences on the Finnish culture which are still visible today.

Since almost all the territory belonging to Finland today has been under the Swedish rule from the early Middle Ages (13th century) until the 1809, Sweden naturally left more impact on Finnish culture and society than Russia has. Not surprisingly the result of this long rule is also a love-hate relationship between Finns and Swedes.

In Finland there are six minorities: the Swedish speakers, the Sámi, the Roma, the Jews, the Old Russians and the Tatars. Of which the Swedish-speaking Finns are the most numerous and enjoy the most privileges.

However, there is something peculiar about this minority. It is a minority based on the language and not on nationality. Although which language people choose to speak in Finland today is a matter of personal preference, it wasn’t always like that. It was not until 1892 that Finnish language became an official language as a result of the rising nationalistic movement. Only then it was considered to be equal to Swedish as both were, and still are used in both administrative and everyday matters.

Swedish was imposed on local population as Finnish has been the language spoken by the majority throughout the times of Swedish rule. But mere imposing wouldn’t make such a strong presence. In fact, right after Swedish speaking people moving to Finland, the strongest support of Swedish came from the local population who adopted the language mostly for socially ambitious reasons. Contrary to common belief that this is still the case today, Swedish is no longer the language of the social elite. But quite the opposite as the number of Swedish-speaking Finns has been in constant decline for the last hundred years or so.

Nevertheless one can find practically everything marked in both languages: from food products to street names. Despite Swedish being a compulsory course for all schoolchildren for several years, its presence varies greatly depending on where in the country one is. Thus Swedish is strongest on the southwest coast and Ahvenanmaa archipelago where at the same time most of the Swedish-speaking Finns live.

In fact its presence is so strong there that the bilingualism is even reversed. If in the rest of the country almost everything is written first in Finnish and then in Swedish, it is the other way around in the southwestern part (and practically nothing is in Finnish on the autonomous archipelago of Ahvenanmaa). And if in the rest of the country one would (naturally) expect to be addressed in Finnish, here one is practically almost always addressed in Swedish. Which feels quite interesting especially since I’m still in the process of learning one strangely beautiful language, here comes another one to add to the confusion.

And to make things even more interesting Swedish-speaking Finns are not as one would think a uniform minority united by the same language. In Finland alone there are more than 80 different Swedish dialects among which many are so strong that speakers from two different dialect groups even cannot understand each other.

It doesn’t end here. Quite often the people working in the service industry will even say the same thing twice, first in Swedish and then again in Finnish. Which then leaves me thinking should I say “Tack” or “Kiitos” in return.

Mladen