Finnish city matches wireless with practical apps for business, gov’t

OULU, Finland-This small city in the cold north, with its combination of cobblestone streets and sleek technology buildings, is integrating wireless service into everyday life as it seeks to compete globally in attracting and supporting high-tech companies.
Oulu, home to a Nokia Corp. research center and hundreds of tech companies, is trying to stay competitive as a home for business. Oulu has a history of international trade, from the days when ocean-going wooden ships were constructed using tar from Finnish forests. The city is seeking to parlay its available land, ocean access and relatively youthful populace into a continued global role in attracting business.
Oulu, about an hour’s flight from the capital, Helsinki, is the largest city in northern Finland, with the area’s population at about 130,000. When the city celebrated its 400th anniversary several years ago, it turned on a free municipal Wi-Fi network as a gift to the residents, including a bus line that offers wireless access. Now, with usage increasing, Oulu is planning to turn on a mesh network this fall, and has come up with practical applications that make use of mobile as well.
For one, people can use their wireless phones to access a parking payment system for easy assurance of avoiding an empty meter. Also, the city established an SMS system for purchasing fishing licenses, instead of the single location that was only open during traditional business hours. The city put up signs at popular fishing locations instructing people on how to purchase a license via their phones. The purchases of licenses shot up, according to Timo Ojala, a professor at the University of Oulu-not because more people were fishing, but because the new convenience encouraged them to buy licenses.
“Up until that point, they had taken their chances with the rangers,” Ojala said, adding that the rangers also are equipped with an application on their mobile phones that can verify the license.
Technopolis is a high-tech business park with several Oulu locations, providing premises for hundreds of small, medium and large companies ranging from startups to American standards such as Hewlett-Packard Co. and Canon Inc., as well as many Finnish companies.
During a recent demonstration, startup company Ball-IT revealed a ping-pong-sized motion controller that it calls the BluetoothBall, similar in concept to the stick-like controller used with the popular Nintendo Wii gaming system. An image of the ball on a cellular phone screen tracked the ball’s real-world movement, as well as enabling a golf putting game in which a twist of the ball aimed the club and a quick squeeze of the cushy sphere resulted in striking the ball. The company hopes to sign its first customer commitments later this year.
Nokia is one of the largest employers in the region, with about 4,600 workers. In its offices in Oulu, Nokia generates about 50 percent of its patents. Employees of the company demonstrated a range of technologies, from the already available-such as the use of a cellphone to control some home stereo equipment-to a prototype scanning application via a handset’s camera that could survey a restaurant menu printed in Chinese and translate the characters into English, and downloadable music that contained an audio “watermark,” in this case an image of album art that displayed on a screen when the song played.
But again, the practical element came into play. Nokia also is testing a system that would allow homeowners to remotely track and monitor the energy consumption of their homes, from appliances to utilities. A homeowner in the test program realized an energy savings between 15 and 20 percent after one week, according to Nokia officials, because the feedback provided by the system encouraged responsible choices and the turning off of unnecessary power hogs.
In contrast to the U.S, the Oulu model for success leans heavily on collaboration among various private and public entities, including businesses, federal and local governments, and the University of Oulu (which has specialized programs for wireless communications). The region has several different groups focusing on helping businesses and entrepreneurs, because as global competition for business gets ever-tougher, the region hopes to capitalize on the support of partnerships, an educated populace and ability to generate new technology because as Jukka Klemettila, chief executive of Oulu Innovation Ltd. put it, price “is not where we can easily compete anymore.”
The Oulu Regional Business works mostly with small companies-fewer than 10 people, and many of them one-man operations-to provide them with expertise such as help on contracts, business lawyers and the like. Not all the companies are high-tech; one is exporting firewood from the area to sell in other markets, although some focus on mobility applications for farmers in the fields.