Hospitality on ice at top of the world

By CHRIS BARTON*

The Ericsson edification journey begins on top of the world - 200km north of the Arctic Circle in Sweden, in the town of Kiruna, on a sled pulled by a team of huskies. It is minus 15 degrees C, so cold that stalactites are growing in my nostrils.

After a merry slide across a pristine snowscape, we pull up outside the famous Ice Hotel. We are momentarily distracted by some Swedes emerging from the sauna. A naked man flings himself through a hole in the ice into frighteningly cold water.

Our group, which includes an unruly bunch of Australian IT journalists and some Ericsson PR minders, gasps in sympathetic pain. Bemused, we trudge in our snow suits past glistening ice sculptures to a snow wall punctured by a reindeer skin doorway.

There are more gasps, this time of astonishment, as we step into an igloo of cathedral proportions. Inside it is minus 5. Down an arched hallway with frozen water columns we proceed to the snow dome of the Absolut Vodka bar. I'm served a blue liquid in a glass fashioned from an oblong ice cube. It sips well. I'm in awe.

The construction, which melts and is rebuilt in a different design every year, is a wonder of the modern world. It also speaks to the Swedish way. Build a big snow and ice house and stay in it overnight. Then figure others might like to do the same. Build a bigger igloo, and market it with typical Swedish understatement. Suddenly you've got a unique business, where people pay between SEK850-1250 ($203-$299) a person a night to huddle in a sleeping bag on reindeer skins in a snow cave.

At Ericsson you get quite a bit of the bizarre mixed with brilliant mixed with the plain just-getting-on with-it.

At the company's Creative World Network Evolution Centre in Stockholm, manager Ronny Bergqvist shows a mockup of a home of the future complete with an internet/TV/e-mail screen on the fridge door. Great for looking up recipes, leaving video messages for the family and automatically providing a shopping list.

As all food in the fridge is scanned by barcode, users can literally dial the fridge by phone to see if they need to buy anything on the way home. Better still, the fridge can call you to advise you're out of eggs - and offer to re-order electronically.

Later, at the company's Kista offices, Mats Gullbrand shows us the present state of the art in location-based mobile phone services. He dials a weather service and sends a text message.

The service then determines his location by figuring out his distance from the cellular site he is calling from and sends him weather information particular to that area.

He also shows how he can find out where his friends are. Text messages are broadcast to several phone users who have agreed to form a kind of phone encounter group. Back comes the information - who's got their phone on, where they are, plus any other personal information the members care to share.

Perhaps the most interesting new devices are two that are run by the Linux operating system rather than the ubiquitous Microsoft windows.

The first is the web screen - a cordless portable electronic tablet (essentially a screen computer with 32Mb of memory) that combines phone, e-mail and internet access using the Opera rather than Microsoft Internet Explorer web browser.

The second is a cordless internet radio - again appearing to be run by Linux and a Cyrix MediaGX microprocessor - and providing access to thousands of internet radio stations. The content is provided through a partnership with MTVi.

Such internet-based appliances are becoming increasingly commonplace - leading one to try to guess what's next. An internet TV perhaps?

*Chris Barton visited Sweden and CeBIT as a guest of Ericsson.

Links

Kiruna

Ice Hotel

MTVi