Susanna Avéssta DIMES susanna.avessta@dimes.fi

DIMES and Forum Virium Helsinki organised their annual seminar with the theme “Social Media: Odottava Oranssi – Finnish for Anticipating Orange”. More than 350 experts and invited guests from different stakeholders attended the seminar and discussed various aspects of services that are directly generated by the end user. The speakers found different innovative ways to grasp the attention of the audience.

Following a poll during the last year’s event the organisers decided to put the annual DIMES and Forum Virium Helsinki event under the theme Social Media. The motto of the seminar, “Anticipating Orange”, expresses the expectation of the ICT and social media industry in Finland, and certainly in the whole Europe, about the future shape of the industry.

A technical interpretation of the objective of the seminar is “Waiting for User-generated Services”. Social media and user-generated services are the main topics of the ICT industry these days, which was impressively demonstrated by the high number of attendees from different companies and organisations, from large corporations, over small and medium enterprises to academic and research institutes. Another aspect of equal importance is that the seminar attracted experts from different disciplines. This can be easily explained by the fact that the roots of Forum Virium Helsinki lie in art, design and media.

The seminar was opened by the representative of the City of Helsinki, Mr. Eero Holstila, followed by an annual review of the activities of the associations hosting the seminar, Mr. Kimmo Ojuva from DIMES and Mr. Jarmo Eskelinen from Forum Virium Helsinki.

In his keynote, professor Luis Correia from the Technical University of Lisbon gave impulses to the audience about possible future evolution paths in mobile and wireless communications. Among other stimulating statements, Prof. Correia said: “We should get more disruptive ideas in R&D.”

Mr. Hannu Nieminen, director in Innovation Acceleration of Nokia’s Office of the CTO, gave a good overview of the mutual dependency of communities and communications through depicting the Nokia Ovi portal. Ovi is an open dashboard that empowers people to link to all of their existing Web communities and Nokia services.

Several presentations from experts in the social media discipline addressed a number of community concerns, such as how to support “causes” using social networking websites, how social media and the living nature would evolve, or how a new era of selling and buying could emerge in the future.

Nico Verplancke from IBBT confronted the audience with a different side of user-generated services, namely antisocial media, reminding the society that it needs to be aware of the possible downsides.

Finland is the birthplace of user-driven innovation, meaning that end users are given the opportunity to use and explore new services very early so that service and application developers learn from the usage patterns and the users’ behaviour.

A number of presentations discussed testbeds, such as the Chinese national testbed. Mr. Anastasius Gavras from Eurescom presented the European approach to large-scale testing facilities through federation of existing testbeds. He presented the current plans for implementing the infrastructure that will support the Panlab framework for a Pan-European Laboratory.

The seminar was complemented by a number of demonstrations in an open exhibition space. Overall the main value of the seminar was a very good opportunity to meet other participants and discuss emerging trends, especially across the borders of different disciplines, a tendency that is becoming a movement towards better understanding the mutual impact of ICT and media on society.

Further information is available at http://news.forumvirium.com/node/181

Please send us your comments on this article.