Nokia succumbs to the charms of Silicon Valley

Nokia, the Finnish mobile maker, has set up a research centre in Palo Alto in Silicon Valley. The centre will work closely with Stanford University, under a three-year agreement.

The areas it will focus on, according to Nokia, are:

“Context-aware content and communities...in the areas of search, advertising and recommendation engines;

Wireless grids, that enable a large number of diverse devices to work together;

Advanced user interfaces and visual media, for Nokia multimedia computers;

Innovation radio and sensor networks, offering novel applications of emerging short-range radio technologies."

Nokia Research Center Palo Alto will employ 35 staff to begin with, rising to 100, and will incorporate research into project-oriented mobile computing courses. Some of the novel ideas it hopes to come up with, will be used and tested by staff and students at Stanford University.

The centre is the second Nokia has set up in the US this year. In April it opened a research centre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which works closely with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, another leading US university.

More on:
www.nokia.com