At this week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona Nokia is showcasing “Green Explorer”, a multi-channel service where people dedicated to a sustainable lifestyle can explore and enjoy the world. Through Green Explorer people can share information, give guidance and communicate about eco-friendly traveling. By signing up to the site you can share eco tips and photos, ask questions, add comments and rank destinations for a more enhanced and meaningful travel experience. In addition, map features include images to visualize destinations and Green Explorer points of interest. And you can take it all with you on your mobile device.
The service has environmental information and eco tips from WWF covering 30 different countries plus eco travel information from Lonely Planet for almost 3000 locations worldwide. You can also select the most sustainable way to get to your destination based on mode of transport, cost, time to destinantion, and CO2 emissions. You can also look up eco city guides and subscribe to eco news from many cities around the world.
“We have added lots of interesting new information and travel tools to the Green Explorer service, and it is great to see people using it to share tips and hints with others. Because Green Explorer is a mobile service people can take it with them on their travels and use it to make their trip fun and environmentally friendly.” says Minna Lindholm, Senior Environmental Manager. Green Explorer can be found at www.greenexplorer.nokia.com and is optimized for your mobile device.
Several innovations from the Nokia Research Center (NRC) will be showcased at Heureka, the Finnish Science Center in an Innovation Finland exhibition on Sunday, November 30, 2008. The event will put a spotlight on a series of significant innovations from three Finnish companies. Eight demonstrations from the Nokia Research Center are among these.
The Heureka event aims to answer the question: how does an invention become innovation? To provide an insight into the question from a Nokia Research Center perspective, Petteri Alinikula, who heads the Core Technology Research in Nokia Reserch Center, will discuss innovation in NRC.
“Demonstrating eight innovations from the Nokia Research Center at the Heureka event is both a great opportunity for us to get our research work in the hands of the public and also valuable recognition of the cutting-edge research that we conduct. Our open innovation approach fosters the development of an incredibly wide variety of innovations, as these examples demonstrate”, said Petteri.
The spectrum of the eight demonstrations that the Nokia Research Center team will unveil to the public at the Heureka event is colorful. Many highlight the way that sensors (such as Global Positioning System (GPS) and accelerometers) are changing mobile devices by turning them into true interfaces between the user and their environment and thereby transforming the way we experience the world around us. Many of the demos are also available for download from Nokia Beta Labs.
The following demonstrations show a glimpse into innovation in the Nokia Reseach Center:
- Nokia Image Exchange: a combined mobile image gallery and web service for sharing and browsing images taken on a mobile device. Just snap and share!
- Nokia Friend View: a location-based service which lets people share their moves and moods on a world map from their mobile device and also from the desktop using a web browser.
- Mobile Video Conferencing: a conferencing service which enables users to bring together friends and family in a video conference – see and talk, all on one mobile device screen.
- Nokia Storm Detector: warns mobile device users about approaching thunderstorms via specific software on the mobile device which listens and reacts to the radio lightning caused by thunder.
- Nokia Carbon Calculator: automatically detects a mobile device user’s travel method, calculates carbon dioxide emissions caused by travelling and thus motivates users to reduce their carbon footprint.
- Near Field Communication (NFC): NFC will make the mobile device the most convenient means of payment, travel pass, building access and interaction with advertisements, just by touching an NFC tag with a device.
- Shaker Racer: introduces a new dimension to radio controlled cars by allowing the user to control a car via a mobile device, based on the user’s movements.
- Morph: leveraging nanotechnology in a completely new type of device concept, which is not only small and thin, but also transparent and stretchable and context aware by adapting to the environment.
The Innovation Finland event is held on Sunday, November 30, from 12 noon until 5pm and is free to the public. Petteri will be delivering a talk at the event at 2.30pm.
For more information on the Nokia Research Center, visit http://research.nokia.com
For more information on the Nokia Beta Labs, visit http://www.nokia.com/betalabs
For more information on the Innovation Finland event (in Finnish), visit http://www.heureka.fi/portal/1021
Fans of the Sports Tracker mobile application will now be able to share and compare their workouts with friends at the new Sports Tracker Beta web service at http://sportstracker.nokia.com. Once registered, you can upload and review your latest workouts, photos from the routes, and see summaries of the total distance, duration, and average speed of your workouts.
For the competetive type, you can also share and compare workouts with friends or the Sports Tracker community. You can also browse others’ workouts by location, for example to find a more exciting training route or one could imagine even a training partner.
Both the mobile application and web service are in beta phase to collect feedback from the user community.The Sports Tracker application was launched in Nokia Beta Labs in April.