Researchers have developed new social media services for the recently created Aalto University in Finland. The services have been developed especially for mobile use. The goal is to find out new ways people use social media services and how capabilities of smart phones can be best exploited.

Ossi is a Facebook-like service for students’ communication in groups. In the other service, Kassi, users can exchange favours.

The new Aalto services are parts of the OtaSizzle project. The project develops a living lab, an open experimentation environment for testing mobile social media services at the Aalto campuses in greater Helsinki.

The new services and the research related to them have been funded by Helsinki University of Technology’s ’Technology for Life’ campaign donations from private companies and communities. In addition to this, Nokia and Elisa have sponsored the project directly by donating for it Nokia N97 smart phones and mobile broadband plans.

More information at:

http://ossi.sizl.org

http://kassi.sizl.org

Videos about the services can be viewed at

Ossi: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2MgMnn18hE

Kassi: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_JXOVXvshg

More information:

Dr Olli Pitkänen, Project Manager

Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT

olli.pitkanen@hiit.fi

Tel. +358 50 301 9265