Invest in Finland

New testing environment for social media mobile applications

09/09/2008

Entitled OtaSizzle, the new test environment has been established in Otaniemi, Finland, with the aim of researching social media use on mobile phones.

OtaSizzle will develop an open experimentation environment for testing mobile social media services that will operate over a number of years, according to the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (HIIT), which is coordinating the project. Over time, OtaSizzle will become a "living lab" for thousands of users in the greater Helsinki area, where they can test and develop their own new social media services.

The OtaSizzle environment is also open to foreign research institutes and companies who want to test and develop their own social media services and innovations on mobile phone users. Existing social media services include IRC Galleria, Facebook, MySpace and Jaiku.

The OtaSizzle project will create prototype mobile social media service platforms and study them with extensive field tests, coupled with quantitative measurements and qualitative analysis. The outcome will be a "packaged" experimentation environment, "SizzleLab" concept, which will also be developed in a way that can be replicated elsewhere.

The first service to be launched is called Ossi-palvelu, where participating technology students are given free broadband connections to keep contact with each other through different electronic chat groups. This will help research into students’ preferences for communicating with each other.

The OtaSizzle project is part of HIIT’s Multidisciplinary Institute of Digitalisation and Energy (MIDE) research programme, which is funded by different companies and organization with more than EUR 20 million.