Happy Lunar New Year

The lunar new year is the most important holiday in Chinese calender. This celebration is shared among many nations in Asia, such as Korean, Vietnamese, Mongolian, Taiwanese etc.



Not only in Asian cities, but also in many cities around the globe, the Chinese community with the local government arrange a local celebration of the holiday.

Yesterday, we had a quite big Chinese new year event in Lasipalatsi, Helsinki. There were many stalls and attractions related to Chinese culture. The event was not only attracted to Chinese community, but also to Helsinki community in general. It was so crowded that you would not miss the atmosphere of a Chinese market in Asia.

We saw a lot of interesting performances, such as dragon and lion dances. Everyone was so enthusiastic to watch and document the cultural performances. They tried hard to catch the best moments with their digital cameras and videos. Some people may forget to bring their cameras or videos, so they took their camera phones from their pockets and tried to take as much as pictures and videos from that event. What a jungle of devices above your heads.

Camera phones may not give the most satisfactory image or video results, but the devices help people to catch interesting moments that may happen unexpectedly in their daily life. It is more often that people forget their digital camera or video than their mobile phone.

Mobile TV: a new future trend

Mobile TV is good news for those who want flexibility of time and place in watching television

Television is undoubtedly a basic need for some people. People can spend hours sitting and staring in front of the television, watching their favourite television programmes: news, football matches, soap operas, you name it. Loyal television audience, the euphemism of television junkies, may well spend more than 8 hours a day watching television. They will raise their eyebrows if you tell them that you do not watch television or do not own one.

For better or worse, there is good news for them: Mobile TV.

Mobile television or Mobile TV is a new way of watching television. You can watch broadcast programmes for information, entertainment and education on your mobile phones by simply subscribing to TV channel packages with your mobile phones.

Responding to the promising market of Mobile TV, several mobile device manufacturers have started to introduce their Mobile TV devices.

Nokia introduced N92 in November 2005 as the first integrated Digital Video Broadcasting for Handheld (DVB-H) mobile device in the Nokia Nseries. Using the mobile device, you can set reminders for your favourite TV programmes and create personal TV channel lists. In addition, the cellular connectivity can also enable you to interact with added-value services, such as voting, blogging, interactive feedback and web services.

Following N92, Nokia later launched N93 as the ultimate mobile device for spontaneous video recording. This device is designed to work with WLAN, 3G (WCDMA 2100 Mhz), EDGE and GSM (900/1800/1900 Mhz) networks to provide broadband Internet access for browsing, uploading content, sending and receiving emails in addition to the Mobile TV over 3G networks.

LG Electronics, one of the early leading global players in Mobile TV from South Korea, which previously worked with Digital Media Broadcasting (DMB) format for the Korean markets, has expanded their market by supporting the DVB-H format as well, through LG-V900 and LG-U900 since early 2006. LG-U900 has a long-life battery that enables people to watch television for more than three hours. In addition, the device also enables high-speed data transmission, various channel services, a high-resolution image and strong mobile broadcasting.

Another important global player from South Korea, Samsung, has shown its authority in Mobile TV by providing diverse handsets that can support any formats, such as Terrestrial DMB (T-DMB) and Satellite DMB (S-DMB) (Asia-Pacific), DVB-H (Europe), and MediaFLO (United States). P900 and P910, which particularly aims to target European market, have successfully been tested during the FIFA World Cup 2006. Only recently, Samsung launches SGH-P930 for the Italian market following the success of the SGH-P920 launch last May. The SGH-P930 combines not only the latest Mobile TV technology, but also HSDPA technology, which enables high-speed data transmission.

A closer look at Finnish information society

Introduction
In the last few years, Finland has been awarded with a numerous prizes of excellence, such as “the most competitive economy”,“the least corrupt country”, “the home base of the most successful mobile phone company”,“the best readers of the world”,“the best students in maths in Europe” (Markkula, 2005). In addition to that, I personally watched the marketing campaign movie at the Foreign Ministry during the visit at their office on the 10th March 2006, which highlights Finland's best areas in Information Communication Technology (ICT), Economy, Research and Education. In this essay, I will describe some of my thoughts about Finland as an information society.

Finland as an information Society
The penetration of technologies, such as mobile phones and Internet, has ranked high in Finland. According to the statistics in December 2004, almost 94% of the households have broadband connection and 30% of them are in use. Among the Internet users within EU, Finns are among the active ones. 61% of 15-74 age group had their own email addresses and 63% of them use their email daily (Nurmela, 2004). People get access to PCs and Internet either from home, workplaces or public access point. Mobile phone subscribers in Finland reach to 87 per 100 inhabitants in Finland at the end of 2002 and by November 2003, 92% of those aged 15-74 had a personal mobile phones and 74% of the population send the text messages weekly (Tuoma, 2004).

Over the last decades, Finland, the seventh largest country with 5.2 million people, has developed from a traditional society into an information society. As the information society, Information Communication Technology (ICT) has played a significant role in improving productivity and changing the way of life of Finns in the terms of production, work, education, distribution channels and habit. Citizens are required to have a high level of ICT literacy and the ability to use and interact with different ICT systems and devices (Fagernäs 2005).

Bank sector is an example how ICT is used in the Finnish public sector. People do not need to queue to pay the bills as most of the bank transaction can be done on-line, for example: Nordea Bank. Even at the Nordea Bank office, it is common that customers are provided with PCs connected to the Internet so they can conduct self-service transaction on the spot.

Not only bank sector, but almost all organizations in Finland have their websites. The websites provide any kind of information and sometimes also online services. In most of Finnish universities, for instance, one can register for a course, take an on-line course, have an on-line learning environment, send inquiry on-line and get their academic credits. In the public library, such as Helsinki Public Library, the citizen can search for a book, read electronic books and journal, borrow and renew books.

ICT has also played a significant role in Finnish education. Instead of being used as an office administrative tool, during my field study at Laajasalo and Arabia comprehensive schools, I observed that the computer and Internet have become a part of everyday learning tools in assisting teachers and students in their educational activities.

The extensive interaction with ICT has formed a unique way of thinking in the Finnish society. The Finnish people is more comfortable to communicate by e-mail regardless their social status. Based on my observation and experience living and having social interactions in several countries in Europe and Asia, the e-mail communication in Finland mostly has the same power as any other ways of communication. Finnish people are usually good in e-mail communication. Furthermore, the ICT literacy of Finnish people is quite high, in a sense, that they face no significant difficulties in accessing and using on-line services or other public services.

ICT has also changed the role of tasks in several some work areas such as customer service. The role of customer service officers in some industries has mainly changed from answering customers' enquiries into the responsibility to guide customers accessing information available on a website.

ICT has also played an important role in empowering the citizens to participate actively in media. A weblog, a web-based publication media, is getting popular in Finland. Individuals and organizations in Finland start to use blogs to publish and share digital information. Many university lecturers, for instance at the Media Lab and ePedagogy department of the University of Art and Design, start to use blog as a media of communication among the students and teachers. Helsingin Sanomat, the biggest newspaper organization in Finland, has now several blog sections. The blog sections can give some opportunities for their readers to comment on their editorials. Blog has opened an opportunity for the society to express their thought publicly.

Beside the computer and Internet, mobile technology also plays an important role in the Finnish information society. Finland is the home of Nokia, one of the biggest and most successful mobile phone company. People from different age groups in Finland use the mobile technology extensively.

They use mobile telephone to carry on various activities from personal communication, entertainment as well as public service usages. Mobile phone is more than a “call and messaging” device, especially for young generation. The multimedia phones have opened up the possibility to use mobile phones as a camera, a video, a music player, etc. There have been many mobile ICT games, applications and services developed using mobile technology.

Helsinki City Transport is a concrete example where mobile technology is being used in daily public services to cater for ticket purchasing services. Using mobile phones, the passengers can buy a bus ticket shortly before getting into the bus. They can simply dial a certain number and receive an SMS containing an electronic code that they can show to the bus driver within a certain period of time as their bus ticket.

Another example is the use of mobile services for laundry payment. At HOAS apartments, the public laundry services use telecommunication services to carry on their activities. The laundry services are automatically charged to mobile phone billing to ease the laundry payment, after dialing a certain phone number and activating a laundry machine.

In summary, ICT has become a significant part of the Finns' way of life. As with any technology, there should be any positive and negative impacts. During my limited observation, I can only reflect some positive impacts of the ICT on the Finnish society. However, a further reflection is still needed to assess the negative impacts of ICT. The readiness of the Finnish society in responding to the challenges resulted from the current use of ICT will determine whether ICT could become a part of the long-term way of life for Finns.

References

• Data from Juha Nurmela, Statistics Finland, March 2004.


• Markkula, Markku. (2005). How to Get on the Top of PISA Tower...and other enigmas of lifelong learning in engineering education in ICT Cluster Finland Review 2005.


• Fagernäs, Leif. (2005). ICT–Essential Tool for the Future in ICT Cluster Finland Review 2005.


• Tuomi, Ilka. (2004). Broadband Status. http://www.meaningprocessing.com/personalPages/
  tuomi/
  articles/FinlandBB.pdf. Accessed 15th May 2006.

Cybrary

During the International Conference in Multicultural Learning and Media Literacy in the Modern World, Keiso Katsura presented his work on Cybrary entitled “Creating the opening days and hours display systems for multiple cultural facilities.” In his project, he is exploring a mobile application using Perl/CGI script programming to give real-time information about library in the worlds (the opening and closing hours, the websites, the calendars and events).

This application uses color image files and text that can be changed by date, hour and minute. He said that he was preparing to build applications for both PC and mobile version soon. His Cybrary service is currently only available in Japan.

He explained that he was currently updating all data manually and by himself. Considering large amount of data about the libraries in the world that available and necessity to update it on daily basis, he needs an automatic instead of manual system. With only a manual system, he would not be able to accomplish his design goal, which is to provide up-to-date information about libraries and cultural facilities in different regions and countries.