[vc_column]
Newsletters 2016
Newsletter 1/2016
Helsinki Smart City Awards 2016
The first Smart City Awards were handed out by the city of Helsinki and Forum Virium Helsinki to four innovations. The award-winning Helsinki city bikes, the Varaamo space booking service, the Respa space booking API and the Whim mobility service app are all showcases of services utilizing digitalization that make urban living easier and more fun.
>> Read more
Helsinki district is being used as one huge innovation platform
“Helsinki is already one of the most modern cities in the world. At the forefront of urban development is the Smart Kalasatama project,” praises Business Insider Nordic.
>> Read more
Bringing smart city innovation to its core
How Helsinki is bringing smart city innovation to its core? With Smart Kalasatama, BIoTope, agile piloting, smart mobility and SOHJOA robot buses, highlights ReadWrite, the leading media platform dedicated to IoT and the Connected World.
>> Read more
Barcelona Smart City Congress 2016
The world’s leading smart city event Barcelona Smart City Congress brought together over 16000 visitors, 591 exhibitors and 420 speakers to share knowledge and debate about the challenges faced by our cities. Forum Virium Helsinki’s projects Smart Kalasatama and CreatFI / Creative Ring were showcased at the ENoLL (European Network of Living Labs) stand in the vast exhibition area.
>> Read more
Six Finnish cities join forces to become better and smarter
The six largest cities in Finland have joined forces to tackle their common urban challenges.
By 2016, they have already launched up to 26 co-operation projects with a budget of 45 million euros, and more is to come. The Six City Strategy enables the cities to experiment in a larger context than just one city.
>> Read more
Strengthen your business with open data
Are you looking into transforming your business, services or customer base? Could open data bring much needed added value to either your business or directly to your customers? Now it’s the perfect time to grasp the many opportunities on offer from the six largest cities in Finland.
>> Read more
DataBusiness Challenge is open
DataBusiness Challenge is a new open data idea and solution competition. It was launched by the six largest cities in Finland (Helsinki, Espoo, Tampere, Vantaa, Oulu and Turku) to bring forth new concepts, mobile or web applications that make our cities smarter and better. Submit your idea or solution by the end of January 2017.
>> Read more
The Smart City API Cook Book is out
The Smart City APIs Cook Book introduces to you the opportunities CitySDK and the Six City Strategy (6Aika) APIs offer for cities, developers and companies. It showcases the experiences of the CitySDK project and the six largest cities in Finland in their efforts to open harmonized APIs. It also gives concrete examples of the use of the current Smart City APIs. Forum Virium Helsinki co-ordinates the API harmonization of the Six Cities.
>> Read more
Making it smart and sustainable
What shall be the next steps in Kalasatama district to make it even smarter and more sustainable? This was the question that around 40 sustainability experts and Smart Kalasatama developers gathered to provide collective intelligence from different countries of Europe in the end of November in Helsinki. The workshop was organized together with EIT Climate KIC.
>> Read more
Helsinki – a forerunner of open data
“The Helsinki region has showed entire Europe the way in opening public data reserves. Now profitable business is being built on top of open information,” writes Hanna Niemi-Hugaerts, Development Manager of Forum Virium Helsinki.
>> Read more
Co-Op City redevelopment plan awarded in an innovation competition
The Co-Op City redevelopment plan for the Kera – industrial site in Espoo – won the second prize in the Nordic Built Cities competition in November 2016. The plan would turn this site owned by S Group from a logistics centre into a sustainable neighbourhood. Forum Virium Helsinki was involved in producing the award-winning proposal.
>> Read more
Helsinki – #3 Best Cities to Live In
Metropolis Magazine ranks the Best Cities to Live In 2016. Helsinki is ranked #3 after Copenhagen and Berlin. The article quotes Veera Mustonen, head of Smart Kalasatama, and Anne Stenros, the first chief design officer of the City of Helsinki.
>> Read more
SELECT open call launches in January
SELECT for Cities lays forth a competition open to all European companies to develop an open, standardized, data-driven, service-oriented and user-centric platform that enables large-scale co-creation, testing and validation of urban IoE applications and services. Tender documents for the competition will be launched in January 2017.
>> Read more
CreatiFI: Accelerating new business for creative industries
CreatiFI project for creative industries has been one of 16 EU-funded accelerator programmes, to promote FIWARE technology and support companies to implement and create new solutions based on FIWARE enablers. In total, nearly 70 companies from 11 countries have participated the programme.
>> Read more
SILVER project successfully completed
The SILVER project had the ambitious goal of establishing and executing the first multiple member state Pre-Commercial Procurement within the European Union. With the development of LEA (Lean Elderly Assistant) Care robot, the SILVER project demonstrated the viability of Pre-Commercial Procurement when procuring innovations.
>> Read more
Upcoming events
- Connected Smart Cities conference 12 January 2017, Brussels
- Information and Networking Days on Horizon 2020, 17–18 January 2017, Luxembourg
- Unconvention 2017, 23–25 January 2017, Brussels
- Save the date: DataBusiness Challenge Awards 15 February 2017, Helsinki
- Save the date: EIT Digital Conference 2017 21 March 2017, Brussels
- Mobile World Congress, 27 February – 2 March 2017, Barcelona
- Open Science Conference, 21–22 March 2017, Berlin