Great news for Switzerland, another global leader in technology (besides Google and IBM) is opening a Research Lab: Nokia (See press release). The research lab will be located in Lausanne and the research program itself is with the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zurich (ETH Zurich).

[The Nokia Research Lab] will focus on helping people benefit from a world where they are connected to each other, to the Internet and also to information from the surrounding physical world. Access to the “Internet of Things” from a mobile device will allow people to collect information from their physical environment, filter it based on their location or preferences and share with their friends or communities.

The initial joint research agenda will focus on pervasive communications:

• Exploring new interaction experiences and technologies utilizing all the human senses;
• Services and applications based on the user’s context, such as location, and personal preferences, e.g., information provided by sensors within a mobile device or in the surrounding world
• Internet services and technologies - enriching the Internet experience on mobile devices.

Personally, I think this is great news because it will will strengthen Switzerland’s position to become a “hotbed of innovation” (See the video from Google Earth CTO Michael Jones on this topic) and will move Switzerland one step closer to become the Silicon Valley of Europe. Discussions about that at “Will a Nokia research center suck up all the Swiss talent?” and here “Europe Is Searching For Its Silicon Valley“.

If you want to know more about the research focus at the new Laboratory, you should watch the embedded video. EPFL has already done a research project for Nokia in 2007 (Project title: Mapping the Digital World) and Francesco Cara, a design strategist at Nokia, has presented some of the results at lift08.

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