Day - 5 Technology Across The Bay

We were in for an exciting day on day 5 of our journey in Sweden. Today we were visiting the innovating wireless car as well as the impressive ABB robotics companies. As usual our morning started out with a knock on the door from the girls next door letting us know the showers were open. Although breakfast was a little bit different today. They had some great choices of oatmeal and one of my roommates Joe Kiser put together a colorful plate of breakfast goods. I have never seen a man so excited to eat breakfast before until today. To say the least we started off the morning great!

Our Ferry Across The Bay

We had a long journey in order to get to our first company today at Wireless Car! For this journey we had to hop on one of the ferries in order to get to the other side of the harbor. It was pretty cool riding this ferry it seemed much smaller than the last one that we rode to the islands. Once we arrived our speaker Martin brought us upstairs to the companies office where we started. Wireless Car supplies services for cars that allows them to basically become a smart car. This technology is so cool that they are currently trying to develop. One of the main things it does is connect the car to a wifi system that allows it to notify the police if you were to get in an accident. It also has the capabilities to contact an auto shop if your car were to break down and let that auto dealer know what is wrong with it and which parts it is going to need in order to be fixed. Martin stated that the largest market for this type of technology was located in the United States and that Europe was a developing market

Conference room at wireless car

for this additional feature. The vision that this company has is very cool and they have a lot of fantastic ideas that will revolutionize the automobiles safety. I hope we see some of this technology come out within the next few years.

Burt and I in front of one of the Robots

ABB robotics was the final stop for us today. JJ has a very strong passion for this company and it was finally really nice to experience it first hand. Burt was our speaker and is one of JJ’s close friends. He was so kind and bought us some fantastic lunch when we arrived. Shortly after we got down to business, we learned that ABB was the merger of two companies ASEA and BBC in 1988. ABB sells a range of robots. Some small and some gigantic, it is really cool to see the capabilities that these robots have! Burt is in charge of Robot Studios, which is the software that allows the robots to run. Burt has been the lead on this for a very long time basically starting the idea. He has been very successful in bringing the robotics studios program into a great business. After talking for awhile about the history and business mentality of ABB he took us for a quick tour of the robots that they use to test their software on. Once we returned from this two of Burt’s employees showed us some of their new technology. Which was a virtual 3d mask, they had all of us put it on and look at the machine displayed in the goggles. It was so extremely cool to see all of this awesome technology in one place.

To end the night off a few of us went to a liquor store and bought an exotic Swedish beer. It was Elk beer and it was very delicious. It was somewhat of a lighter beer but it tasted very good. After an hour or two we headed to the Hockey game that JJ had scheduled for us. This was my first hockey game ever so I thought it was necessary to purchase a jersey. It was a great choice if I must say! We all had a fantastic time cheering on the Indians. Although we couldn’t chant with the crowd we made plenty of noise and made our presence felt! I couldn’t have asked for a better way to end such a great night.