Finnish company Uros and Thundercomm Technology, a provider of smart device hardware and software, have announced that they will open a joint innovation centre at Uros headquarters in Oulu. It will use products and services from Qualcomm Technologies to develop IoT and 5G systems for smart cities, wearables, artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, drones, industrial IoT, financial technology and automotive applications.

5G has been promoted for years as being the communications game changer for Industry 4.0 and the Industrial Internet of Things. If you’re not up to speed on 5G yet, it’s essentially the next generation of cellular communications that is reportedly 10x faster than current 4G speeds. While this increase in speed is critical to the expansion of things like autonomous cars and remote robotic surgery (see this CNN video for a brief explanation of 5G from a consumer point of view), it’s more of a process optimization factor for industry.

The Norwegian city of Tromsø annually hosts the Arctic Frontiers conference, with the 2019 edition having focused on a Smart Arctic. This focus is timely, given present interest in Smart Innovation. But what does ‘smart’ mean in Arctic contexts? And how can Northern peoples and organizations benefit from it?

A non-invasive sensor that detects events in rooms without the use of cameras, a technology that converts text manuals into interactive Augmented Reality trainings and a voice recognition software that recognizes 50 different emotions to enable empathic human-machine interaction – these are just three out of 25 outstanding technologies that are nominated for the EIT Digital Challenge final.

A panel discussion exploring how the "datafication" of business and institutions is creating wholesale change in business economics, practices and employment, and how communities should prepare to respond. Moderated by Roberto Gallardo.

Juha Ala Mursula is an experienced Economic Development Director with a demonstrated history of managing large organizations engaged in change in the public sector. With skills in product lifecycle management, embedded and open-source software, innovation management and mobile technologies, he oversees economic development in one of Finland’s leading technology centers. A graduate of the University of Oulu, he holds an MBA in international business from the Helsinki School of Economics.

Josef Salpeter, VP Business Development, FARA AS, explains why forward-thinking transport solutions need to affect the public transport of today, not just tomorrow, and why it’s so crucial that operators, authorities and technology providers find a way to put sustainable, efficient transport front and centre to meet passenger requirements…

An increasing part of the population live in cities and urban areas. In fact, 80 per cent of the world’s future population of 9 billion is expected to live in urban areas by 2050. Transportation has already caused most large cities to be heavily congested and polluted. Some front runners have set ambitious goals for city centres to become virtually car-free, like Oslo and Madrid, but that is not reality for the majority and even the capitals of Norway and Spain still have quite a way to go.

	City Center of Oulu - By John Jung

During my recent visit to Oulu, the Capital of Northern Scandinavia and the beginning of the Lapland region of Finland, I visited the Oulu Museum of Art which was hosting an exhibit called “The Hype in the Arctic Silicon Valley”. It was a quiet Saturday afternoon and I had the opportunity to visit the exhibit with Juha Ala-Mursula, who today was the head of BusinessOulu, but at the time of the height of the exhibit’s focus around 2010, he was one of the lead Nokia executives in Oulu that was developing the wireless technologies on display. This was his first visit to the exhibit and like a child at Christmas opening familiar presents, his eyes glistened at the sight of his long-lost friends. “This is the Nokia 6000 Series; I recall my team working on this model and…” and he would be off in another time and place. “…and here is the Nokia E72………” He and his teams would continue to be proud of their accomplishments that raised this city at the southern end of Lapland into a technological force that few communities could boast about in the world.

Olympics fans arriving at South Korea’s Gangneung Station on their way to the coastal ice arenas this week are getting a sneak peek at 5G Champion, a pioneering mobile-broadband project two years in the making. This joint EU-Korea venture—led by France’s CEA-Leti and South Korea’s Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute—stands out as a quiet contender in what the Games’ official telecommunications sponsor, KT Corp., has dubbed the “first 5G Olympics.”

The Finnish, live-streamed competition allows tech entrepreneurs to pitch their business to a group of investors while standing waist deep in frigid waters of the Baltic Sea. The goal is to get your message across quickly in order to spend as little time in the water as possible.

Think Dragon’s Den with the temperature turned way down, and less clothing.