Nordic cluster collaboration

In the days before the X-mas holiday a meeting to discuss Nordic collaboration was held at the Kista Science Center in Stockholm.

The meeting was initiated by Wireless future to achieve a Nordic collaboration in wireless technology and market areas where a larger Nordic cluster may achieve more then regional or national clusters.

There are several such areas. One is to achieve global visibility. Today the GSMA Mobile World Congress is considered the best alternative. MWC is mainly a meeting place for large Operators, mobile phone and system manufacturers, but it works as national pavilions creates visibility at an an affordable cost for SME's. In other parts of the world that are just as important markets for our industry there are no such initiatives. On CTIA i April, the second most important congress, so far only one Nordic SME (from Finland) has registered. Maybe we can achieve more for less by collaboration on CTIA, Mobile Asia and other important exhibitions, and why not establish a large Nordic Meeting place instead of lots of small regional congresses.

Other ares of collaboration is within sharing of competence, resources and networks, or within standardization, research and innovation.

Representatives from almost all the leading Nordic wireless clusters participated. Here you can find presentations of the clusters in the meeting and other presentations from the meeting.

Conclusion of the meeting was to establish Nordic Wireless to become a:

• Connector!

for

• Business!

&

• Collaboration!

Other results of the meeting was that:

In Barcelona Tomas Bennich in SMA will help to connect for Nordic companies interested in beeing evaluated to come one of the most prestigious "company to watch" lists in the world.

An offer to take over free space from Kvalberg at the Mobile World Congress was sent to all Nordic countries. This space is now booked by Boost Communication.

Wirless future will send out an invitation from Innovation Norway regarding assistance for booking of meeting rooms and an offer for a breakfast seminar at CTIA to the other Nordic Mobile clusters to invite also companies from other Nordic countries to share this invitation.

Technopolis suggested to make Access Forum an event where Nordic wireless companies meets international Venture Capital firms. We will come back with more information on this.

Telecom City and the ICT cluster of North Denmark suggested to make a Nordic Invitation of their activities (Cat Walk and Wireless VITAE). This will be done through a Nordic Wireless Group on Linked in that was established.

My impression was that there is genuine will to cooperate on a Nordic basis and we should be able to achieve much more with time. There is not much on the Nordic Wireless Group yet, but why don't you register and start a discussion.

More projects starting up in the Agder region

Together with the VRI project more pre-projects related to wireless technology are in the startup phase. The topics covered in the projects are Condition Based Maintainence (CBM) using sensor networks, using medtech equipment/sensors with wlan infrastructures in hospitals and mesh networking in a hybrid radio/optical network. More information will be published as the projects evolve. All three projects involves companies from Agder and researchers from University of Agder.

Industrial Wireless Security Workshop in Kristiansand

During the NIK/NISK conference in Kristiansand in november we had a workshop on industrial wireless security. The program was as follows:

• Wlan SIM kort (Poul Heegaard, Telenor R&I)
  
• Sikker Autentisering, NFC og BankID (Petter Taugbøl, enCap)
  
• Common Evalualtion Criteria (Jens Helge Rypestøl, Applica Consulting)
  
• [hiddn] Opportunities (Adnan Visic, High Density Devices)
  
• Future SIM mulighetsstudie (Asle Pedersen, Trådløs Framtid

Although, unfortunately, we had rather few participants (approx. 10), those who were present expressed that it was both interesting and useful. During the workshop some of the companies found matching interests businesswise. We also identified some interesting new research topics, such as how to obtain integrity/security when running multiple applications on a sim-card.

Collaboration with the VRI (Agder) projects - Future SIM - Wireless Instrumentation - Mesh networking

In Agder Wireless future is collaborating with VRI-Agder in three projects.

A feasibility study to outline the possibilities in future SIM card technology and architecture is co-financed with VRI-Agder. The partners in the VRI project are Devoteam Telecom, Applica Consulting and University of Agder, however both Telenor R&I and UNIK are contributing to the project. Results of the project will be made available to the participants in the network, probably in a work shop to define further activities in Wireless future related to Future SIM.

The Research Council of Norway encourage collaboration between Arena projects and the VRI project. The collaboration was quite obvious in this case because the project management of Wireless Future (Agder node) and the ICT part of VRI Agder both sits at Coventure AS (formerly Sørlandets Teknologisenter AS).

Other VRI projects in the Agder region are also related to wireless technology such as a project involving Scanmatic, Origo Engineering/Origo Mobikom, University of Agder and Devoteam Telecom which is looking into ad-hoc wireless industrial instrumentation. Another project have been looking into Mesh networking and Wimax test/live-lab facilities involving in particular NextNet, University of Agder and Devoteam Telecom.

Future SIM workshop in cooperation with ATC

In collaboration with Unik and Movation Wirless future arranged a workshop during the ATC conference June 23 - 25 focusing on "The Role of the SIM in a World of Personalized Services and Connected Objects".


New SIM card technology may lead to a paradigm shift in architecture, functionality, and services of future communication devices. In the workshop new technologies that just have become available was presented by two of the leading players in the world. There where many interesting discussions during the workshop, and as a consequence of the workshop two large enterprises entered into collaboration for a trial project. Also Wireless future has started a project in Southern Norway to further explore the opportunities of the new technology.

In view of the importance of this development for the wireless industry I had whished to see every member in our network in the workshop. That did not happen, though the few but most important players where all there. We just have to accept that most of the members in our network are small companies beeing focused on mastering their daily challanges which gives them very little time for considering new opportunities or threats.

Here you may find links to the presentations.

Open Nordic Mobile

June 19 - 20 Wireless future in cooperation with Trolltech and Telenor arranged the Open Nordic Mobile conference as one of several legs of the Open Nordic conference in Skien.

The program of the Open Nordic Mobile leg was well balanced covering both status and future development within Open Source SW and HW. Mikko Terho from Nokia and Terrence Barr from SUN where main attractions in program for the Mobile leg.

The quality of the presentations was generally excellent, creating a work shop atmosphere with rewarding discussions. Nokia/Trolltech and SUN represents different types of software development philosophies, partly competing and partly completing each other. With Nokia from now on standardizing on Trolltech QT it will indeed be interesting to follow how this will effect future mobile SW development.

Although we were quite satisfied with the content of the conference, we were not satisfied having only 30-40 participants in average listening to the presentations. Also the other legs of the Open Nordic had fewer visitors than expected although an excellent program. We thus believe that having a Nordic conference on the Midsummer Evening is not a good idea.

The collaboration with EZ/Open Nordic worked out well, despite that small but important things went wrong. F.ex. the link to the presentation of mobile leg only worked now and then, the mobile leg and our sponsors did not get the attention we expected.

In summary though we are happy with the results, but if we do it again we will do it another way.

Smart Living Seminar in Kristiansand

In Southern Norway there is a large cluster of wirless companies colaborating with the Wireless Future in the subproject Intelligent environments. June 5. Devoteam Telecom, one of the main players of the cluster, hosted a full day seminar for Smart Living in Kristiansand.

Devoteam Telecom is the former GPRS development department of Ericsson having world class competence within development of GSM networks. Devoteam Telecom is still a major development contractor for Ericsson, but since divestment the business of Devoteam has expanded to several new areas like m2m where smart living is an interersting sector.

The program of the seminar had a wide span, from home automation to car sharing based on mobile technology, to entertainment. Wireless Future contributed with an overview stressing new trends within mobile software developement. For Wireless Future members the Devoteam presentation of IMS was of special interest.

The seminar ended late in the evnening with mingling, seafood and a fantastic trip by boat from Lillesand to Kristiansand.

Link to wf presentation (samme as Eliaden):