Facebook establishes their first European data centre in Luleå, SWEDEN

27 Oct 2011, Facebook announced that they will establish their first European data centre in Luleå, Sweden.

The data centre will be the largest of its kind in Europe, with an area of 84,000 square meters which is equivalent to more than 11 soccer fields. The construction will take place in three phases and when completed it will consist of three server rooms. The first should be operational in one year and the whole plant should be completed by 2014. Much of the traffic from Facebook’s global 800 million users will be handled at the new datacentre.

– After a rigorous review process of sites across Europe, we concluded that Luleå offered the best package of resources - including a suitable climate for environmental cooling, clean power resources, available land, talented regional workforce and supportive business and corporate environment, says
Tom Furlong, Director of Site Operations at Facebook.

 »Why Facebook chose Luleå

CDT participates in Open days at Luleå University of Technology

On October 15 LTU celebrate its 40th anniversary with an open house for the public. This was a fun and eventful day in which CDT participated exposing four projects (iRoad, EIT-ICT labs, SATIN II and SAVE Energy). Visitors could view results if the form of games, filmes or "gadgets", but also contribute with creative solutions and ideas.

CDT participates in the Open days in Brussels on October 10-13

This week is the yearly event for the EU Open days. This year the focus is on Private-Public-Partnership. CDT are there on site during these days to exchange initatives and good examples on Smart sustainable inclusive growth in regions and cities. CDT staff is also invited as panelist and moderator in two sessions in a side-event arranged by the Concord-project in the domain of Smart cities and Regional innovation and Smart specialisation. »more

TEFIS portal version beta released and demo!

The TEFIS project is developing an open plattform for Future Internet experimenters to access and run their entire experiment by combining resources from different testbeds(including resources from Botnia Living lab) and to share knowledge with other experimenters. The first pioneers experiment is now launched and will be demonstrated by us at Servicewave 2012 in Poznan on October 26. »www.tesfiproject.eu

CDT is partner and Swedish co-ordinator in large European ITEA-2 proposal.

SITAC - Social Internet of Things: Apps by and for the Crowd, is a proposed project within the European industry-driven ITEA2 cluster.

The project aims at enabling end-users to create mobile services (apps) that take advantage of the emerging billions of connected devices. The "social network" paradigm is used to simplify human-to-machine and machine-to-machine communication, we become "friends" with e.g.

our car and our garage-door, and the car and the garage-door become "friends" with each other. That way, MY car can open MY garage-door, but not accidently another door.

The proposal is supported by 40 partners in 10 countries.

Östen Mäkitalo is deceased

The "father of mobile telephony" Östen Mäkitalo is deceased, as of 16 June 2011. Östen Mäkitalo was co-founder of CDT (1994) and has been chair of CDT Board of Directors since start.

At the University and in the CDT partnership, we have shared, with other colleagues and friends, the fortunate opportunity to experience Östen's unique capability to encompass future technological development and its relation to emerging human and societal needs and desires, and - maybe most importantly - Östen's capacity to bring vision into reality.

The most well known of Östen's many achievements, is his groundbreaking contribution to mobile telephony. From his position in Televerket ( now TeliaSonera» ), Östen was the driving innovator in realizing the vision of "calling a person without knowing where he/she is".

Adding to peoples warm appreciation of Östen, were also his very gentle manners and his collaborative skills - rooted in his upbringing in the small village Koutojärvi in north Sweden - as well as his never ceasing will to inspire and help other people to bring forward and realize their own innovative ideas.

- "In spite of the fact that I have worked on regular basis with Östen over more than fourteen years, I continued to get new valuable elements of experiences and knowledge from Östen. These, I will continue to use and share with others" says Mikael Börjeson, CEO at CDT.

Naturally, our first condolences go to Östen's family and relatives. At LTU/CDT we will also miss him very much, and we will continue to work in Östen's spirit, with strong focus on human needs and usage aspects, in our continued R&D efforts.

Ida wins an ipad in slogan competition as part of Ericsson Application Awards 2011

Together with the beta-testing of the apps in the Ericsson Application Awards 2011, the beta-testers participated in a competition to propose a theme for next years EAA. The winning theme: “Making Life easier” was submitted by Ida Jonsson, a student at LTU. Ida received the prize, an iPad last week, by Jan-Olov Johansson, CDT, Birgitta Bergvall-Kåreborn and Josefin Lassinantti, Social Informatics.

Ericsson Application Awards 2011

CDT has cooperated with Ericsson Research in EAA 2011. Ericsson Application Awards, EEA for short, is a competition for developers of mobile applications. More than 150 teams from over 50 countries have participated in the competition.

CDT have organized the evaluation of apps, submitting the semi-finalists to evaluation on-line by 1000 end-users in four countries, and hands-on evaluation by 50 beta-testers. The winning app within the student category was the Italian ”What’s in My Kitchen”, an app that uses RFID technology to help you keep track of the content in your refrigerator, give recipe suggestions, warn about expiration dates etc. In the company category, the UK “HipSnip” shoppin app for product advice won first place, while the Luleå-based “EmergencyDroid”, came as a close second. EmergencyDroid is develpoed by a team at CDT partner Neava, and is an app that sends an automatic alarm if you are in a car crash.
www.ericssonapplicationawards.com

CDT project Sense Smart City Winner of Future Internet Summit Award

On the 6th of June 2011, Jan Pettersson at CDT received the price Future Internet Summit Award in Luxembourgh on the second Eurpean Summit on the Future Internet. The price is awarded to projects which have the potential to radically shape the future internet. An international jury selected the winners among nominated projects. Project Sense Smart City won the first price for the best idea and 5000 € in award.

>>More pictures

CDT IT-Organisation of the Year 2010

Every year the IT society (Dataföreningen Norrbotten) nominates and appoints the IT organisation of the year and the IT personality of the year. The price is given to the winners at a ceremony at a gala where the Industry, Business and Entrepreneurs who create growth and development to the region are celebrated. This year the gala was held on May 13th at Kulturens Hus in Luleå.

Photo: Ramin Karim (IT Society), Mikael Börjeson (CDT), Anders Granström (Luleå Kommun), Marlene Mark (IT Society)

>> More

>> www.naringslivetspris.se

CDT RESEARCH ON BUSINESS MODELS IN THE EU EXPERT PANEL CASE STUDY REPORT ON SERVICE INNOVATION IN THE EU

The MEMO project is one case mentioned in a report released today at European level.

>>More

IT4tourism

Research at CDT empowering the tourism sector!

Read more about different CDT projects in the area of IT and tourism

Smart Individual Energy Savers

SmartIES is a new project financed by NordForsk focusing on Living Lab activities leading to knowledge on how to motivate energy savings in households which just kicked off. CDT has a role as partner and leader of the creation of a theoretical framework for Living Lab Cases and Living Lab Operations.

Project Leader is Innovation Center Iceland (ICI) and Iceland Living Lab. The other partners are; Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and the Wireless Trondheim Living Lab, A9 consulting (A9C) and Sunrise Valley Science and Technology Park (SVST).

The project aims to create a Nordic citizen innovator user-pool for smart city evolution as well as an indicator framework for Living Lab operations showing proof of concept of the Living Lab approach and finally a best-practice transnational Smart City Living Lab Pilot based on evidence based methods and approaches for Living Lab activities.

New handbook released!

Race to scale - users as catalysts for innovative IT solutions, In this guide the FormIT methodology for user involvement is descibed, lessons learned from a use-case applying the methodology is shared and finally there are Guidelines for the readers to support their planning of user involvement in innovation processes.  

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