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'The mobile will be the magic wand you use to control your life'
Pekka Sivonen, 39, founder of Finland's Digia, talks about the Helsinki Virtual Village, a living lab for high technology
The Helsinki Virtual Village has everything people will need — residential, campus and industrial areas. One thing we don't have is a cemetery, but I can see that coming.
We are trying to improve quality of life by providing applications and services that will solve people's everyday problems, allowing them more time because they'll be able to do things more efficiently.
The Virtual Village gives us insight because we are building a huge laboratory of 10,000 people. In this kind of development environment — when technologies come and go rapidly — you need to just throw things against the wall without researching inside out and knowing whether they're going to stick. You just have to do it and see whether it's something with the features the market needs and consumers want. That's why world-class companies [such as IBM and Nokia] have partnered with us. They need to bring technologies from their labs earlier, to an environment where end-users test them, especially when introducing new forms of interoperability between devices.
New concepts are entering the market because of the emergence of Bluetooth [a wireless technology that connects appliances within a 10-m radius]. The Bluetooth standard is revolutionary. It's the basis for interoperability among devices, be they coffee grinders, washing machines, TVs, VCRs or stereos. The mobile phone will be the magic wand you use to control your life, the remote control for devices with Bluetooth capability.
Put your watch, your wallet with everything inside it — money, loyalty cards, driver's license, all kinds of IDs, credit cards — and your car, home and office keys on the table next to your mobile phone. Then wrap them inside a package with no more than three buttons and a flashy touch-sensitive color screen. Add voice and character-recognition capability, and imagine what can be done. That single tool will act as a replacement for all those things. Down the road, you won't need any of them, other than the mobile phone.
I believe that we're going to have a big impact with these technologies. I'm a great fan of science fiction. We have a 45-page vision paper for our applications. It's the best science fiction I've read, and I'm living it.
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True North
Along the back roads and around the islands to find space researchers in the Arctic Circle and African asylum seekers in Denmark
Photo Gallery
Check out the photos from this leg of TIME's Fast Forward Europe voyage
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Magic Wand
Finnish telecommunications entrepreneur Pekka Sivonen shows off Helsinki's Virtual Village
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People To Watch: The Cajanders | Mart Laar | Kalle Lasn | Philip Diklev
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PHOTO: CREDIT TK
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