The Øresund Region has companies and institutions carrying out research and development in most of the technologies that are driving the wireless revolution. Moreover, the region’s leading position in the GSM arena is secured by continuous feedback from the experienced and technology-interested local users.

Ensuring access

The Øresund Region is an advanced centre for usage and innovation of radio technolo­gies. Birthplace of the Bluetooth techno-logy, it attracts major players of the wire­less area. The largest supplier of mobile systems in the world, Ericsson, has con­centrated its Bluetooth R&D activities in the region through the subsidiary Ericsson Technology Licensing.

Several other companies are dedicated to the development of products and services based on Bluetooth and many of them are pioneers in their areas. GN Netcom, for ex­ample, was the first to receive Bluetooth 1.0b certification for its professional head­set and is already producing its second generation of Bluetooth-enabled wireless headsets, while NEXTLINK.TO has de­veloped the world’s smallest Bluetooth head­set.

MPI Tech has just launched the world’s first commercially available Bluetooth Printer Adapter for USB printers and Anoto is worldly known for its digital paper and Bluetooth-equipped pen that allow users to send writings and drawings to computers and mobile phones. Other local firms, such as Telelogic, are active players in the defi­nition of both language and application standards in the telecommunications in­dustry.

The Øresund Region’s wireless expertise also includes companies that look for sim­pler and inexpensive solutions for people’s everyday life. This is the case of Zensys, which offers RF-based products and ser­vices for the development of the "intelligent home". Zensys’ solutions trans­form any stand-alone device into a net­worked device that can be controlled and monitored wirelessly.

State-of-the-art terminals

The local engineering expertise produces pioneering devices that showcase some key elements of future mobile communica­tions.

Such expertise is, for example, found in Lund, at Ericsson Mobile Platforms and Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications, both with R&D facilities in the city. Or in Copenhagen, where Nokia employs about 1,200 people and has its largest Production Creation Centre for mobile phones outside Finland.

Propositions about how future mobile de­vices will look like come also from smaller companies. Mobintech has created a device that is an original solution for the mobile Internet. Spectronic, which was the first in the world to manufacture a mobile phone with an inbuilt computer, develops tech­nologies that are very often seen in de­vices commercialized by the large mobile phone companies.

On the move

The region’s companies are creating the services and products that will keep users communicating on the move.

Realtime, for example, is a leading Euro­pean provider of wireless application infra­structure and services to the mobile mar­ket. Zellsoft develops software for com­mercial mobile Internet solutions for mo­bile operators through out Europe.

The battle to keep users attention and in­terest can rely on good fighters from the Øresund Region. “Young, mobile and en­tertaining” is the motto of the company PinkFloor, which focuses on teenage girls as target group for interactive entertain­ment.

UnwiredFactory, with entertainment prod­ucts that take advantage of location-based systems, and ITE, with a high-quality mo­bile phone game based on its popular character Hugo, are two other companies targeting the young public.

Business performance

Many of the region’s companies are dedi­cated to exploit the freedom and accessi­bility provided by mobile communication to improve businesses performance.

2BM enhances mobile solutions offering connectivity tools that allow knowledge workers to access and record data and in­formation. Mobilized Workforce also cre­ates professional mobile Internet applica­tions and is already active in all European markets through partnerships with IBM, Nokia and Wavecom.

Mecom develops solutions in a selected number of business areas such as trans­port and shipping, public health service, offshore and retail trade. The company was founded to bring forward solutions for networking within standards like Bluetooth, Wireless LAN, RFID and OCR.

Exploring new possibilities

The Øresund Region has research centres with advanced expertise within the mobile wireless, both in the applications field and in the design of new handsets and infra­structure components.

The Personal Computing and Communica­tion Centre (PCC), located in Lund, is one of the largest Swedish initiatives in com­munication and computing. The centre de­velops state-of-the-art research within de­sign for mobile communications, mobile wireless access to fixed networks, and adaptive antennas. Another important in­sti­tution in the area is the Centre for Physi­cal Electronics (CPE), at the Technical Uni­versity of Denmark (DTU), which is mainly dedicated to circuitry design, especially for mobile communications.

Thanks to partnerships between companies and researchers, the region is becoming a stage for exciting experiments that will ul­timately show what users really want of fu­ture mobile communications. In the future Copenhagen district Ørestad, the project Crossroads Copenhagen will transform the district into a gigantic test field of wireless communications. Several companies, like Nokia, are involved in the project that is aimed at testing new mobile solutions and products, with special focus on wireless lo­cal networks.

February 2003