One interesting company dabbling in this field, Helsinki-based Enevo, just picked up €2 million ($2.6 million) in funding from Finnish Industry Investment and Lifeline Ventures. The money will be used to help Enevo push its cleantech services across Europe and into North America.

Enevo isn’t the only company working on smarter waste management, but rivals (such as BigBelly) are largely trying to sell more intelligent bins. Enevo, on the other hand, is a services firm that provides sensor units to waste management companies for free. The unit (pictured in the hands of CEO Fredrik Kekäläinen) measures variables such as volume and temperature within the bin, then sends the data back to Enevo via GPRS. The company then uses that data to dynamically optimize collection intervals and routes for its customers.

The intended result? Fewer overflowing bins and fewer pointless journeys to empty bins that are barely full. In the trillion-dollar industry that is waste management (according to Lifeline), that adds up to a pretty big deal. According to Kekäläinen, Enevo’s existing 10-or-so customers are already saving 30 percent on direct waste logistics costs.

Kekäläinen told me on Wednesday that Enevo has started mass production of its sensor units (using a Finnish manufacturer “to make sure it’s really high quality”) and is recruiting salespeople across Europe. The company has deals with municipalities across Scandinavia and is setting up a pilot project in Canada. It’s also in talks with the big bin manufacturers to try get the sensor units integrated into their products.

All in all, it’s a simple idea that can produce tangible results – cost savings for firms and greater efficiency and environment-friendliness for communities. As such, it’s a pretty good example of what we’re hoping to see come out of the much-hyped internet of things.

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From SC5′s blogpost:

“We are doing this just out of curiosity to try out new things. Bitcoin as such fits our vision of the world quite well. It allows for open source development, competition and innovation in the field of payments and Internet commerce. Based on cryptography, it is secure and deterministic as we require for digital services. As a comparison, credit cards rely on few enough physical cards getting stolen or copied and the centralized organizations covering fraud for billions of dollars each year.

“For currency conversion we use the daily exchange rate of the payday. The euro amount to be converted into Bitcoins is deducted from the net salary on the employee’s paycheck. Bitcoins are sent to the address provided by the employee.”

I’m not an economist, so I’m going to steer clear of commenting on the wisdom of opting to receive part of your pay in Bitcoins (there are also many excellent explanations about how the currency is algorithmically generated and controlled). That said, Bitcoin has been doing very well recently – so well that many suspect we’re experiencing a Bitcoin bubble.

SC5′s decision to experiment with Bitcoin-based salary payments is not entirely surprising. Last month a young developer by the name of Martti Malmi joined the company — Malmi, also known as Sirius, was one of the earliest developers involved in the Bitcoin project.

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Kava laid out these tenants, and connected them to Google’s data center design strategy, during the Green Grid Forum in Santa Clara, Calif. on Tuesday:

1). Focus on the users and all else will follow: Google’s audience is global, so it’s not surprising that the search giant is looking to build data centers across the globe to serve different regions of the world. By placing servers as close to users as possible, Google cuts down on the time it takes for users to use its tools and do search queries. Kava said Google processes 1 billion search queries across its global users per month. Picking locations, and constructing data centers, is ultimately a UX issue for Google.

Google’s data center in Lenoir

2). It’s best to do one thing really, really well: Google by some guesses has built as many as 40 data centers, so it’s safe to say that Google has the process of finding a location and building a facility down pat. Over the years, the company has included in its criteria things like finding a good local workforce and accessing a robust electric grid as key qualifications. More recently, Google has increased the importance of greener issues like finding a location where the utility offers a significant amount of renewable energy.

3). You can be serious without a suit: Even though Google doesn’t care about how data centers look from the outside, it aims to bring a piece of the alternative Google culture from its HQ to its server farms. Kava showed a slide of a colorful recreation room at a data center to emphasize the company’s “work hard, play hard” philosophy.

4). The need for information crosses all borders: This philosophy relates to at least two aspects of Google’s data center operations. First the move to putting data in the cloud makes it easier for users to access data wherever they are. Second, Google is looking to be transparent about the metrics for its data centers. Given the importance of energy in designing and running data centers, Google has opted to make public some of its internal energy consumption data.

5). You don’t need to be at your desk to get answers: Google searches for interesting and unusual solutions for some its data centers across the globe, and far outside of its Silicon Valley roots. For example, Kava highlighted its data center in Finland that uses the cold outside air and sea water to cool its servers. The data center is inside a former paper mill, and Kava noted that Google has re-used pumps and other electrical equipment from the mill to operate its servers. It’s a highly unique design and one of the only ones like it in the world.

6). Faster is better than slow: In Google’s philosophy, the term efficiency doesn’t just refer to how Google wants to use electricity to power servers. How quickly Google designs and builds data centers is equally important, Kava said. He pointed to a data center in Georgia that took 16 months rather than 2-3 years as an example of how the company has created a set of standards for designing and building data centers.

7). Great just isn’t good enough: This rule has to do with setting higher goals, and Kava used it to describe how Google also allows room for customizing data center designs to make better use of local resources. For example, the company relies on the cold outside air instead of a chiller to cool its data center in Dublin, Ireland.

8). There is always more information out there: Google is currently on the fifth generation of its data center designs, but Google still continues to learn and improve its process. Sometimes that means that Google has to learn techniques and skills outside of its core competency. The need to cool servers and reduce wasteful energy consumption has forced Google to develop an expertise in designing systems to transfer and use energy more efficiently. In addition, to make the most use of the indoor space of its data centers, Google has designed the layout of its servers to maximize the effectiveness of cooling systems.

9). You can make money without doing evil: Reusing waste water is a good example of something that Google can do for both economic and eco reasons. In Belgium, Google has built its water treatment plant to take water from a canal nearby suitable for industrial use. The company also uses treated wastewater for its data center in Georgia.

10. Democracy on the web works: O.K. this one is a bit of a stretch. Yes, democracy does work, indeed, Kava said, but it’s hard to draw a connection between this last rule and Google’s data centers.

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The affected posts are all in IT – 300 jobs are being cut outright, and up to 820 employees will be transferred to HCL Technologies and Tata Consultancy Services. Most of those affected are in Nokia’s home country of Finland, although the company is being pretty vague about the precise number. This is to be expected, due to the imminent consultation period.

It’s important to note that this is not entirely new: Nokia said back in June 2012 that it would do away with around 10,000 jobs worldwide by the end of 2013, and these are the last to go as part of that total in Finland. According to a spokesman, at the end of last month Nokia still had around 5,900 employees in Finland, excluding those working for Nokia Siemens Networks.

Those who are being made redundant rather than outsourced will be offered support through the Bridge program, a scheme designed to help ex-Nokians establish new startups. The most notable product of this program – at least so far – is Jolla, the company that’s trying to revive the largely abandoned MeeGo platform with its Sailfish OS. Of course, that’s an engineering play, so it will be interesting to see what potential spinoffs come out of Nokia’s IT operations.

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The confirmation-slash-denial comes after security researcher Gaurang Pandya, who works for Unisys Global Services in India, detailed on his personal blog how browser traffic from his Series 40 ‘Asha’ phone was getting routed via Nokia’s servers. So far, so Opera Mini: after all, the whole point of using a proxy browser such as this is to compress traffic so you can save on data and thereby cash. This is particularly handy for those on constricted data plans or pay-by-use data, as those using the low-end Series 40 handsets on which the browser is installed by default (it used to be known as the ‘Nokia Browser for Series 40′) are likely to be.

However, it was Pandya’s second post on the subject that caused some alarm. Unlike the first, which looked at general traffic, the Wednesday post specifically examined Nokia’s treatment of HTTPS traffic. It found that such traffic was indeed also getting routed via Nokia’s servers. Crucially, Pandya said that Nokia had access to this data in unencrypted form:

“From the tests that were preformed, it is evident that Nokia is performing Man In The Middle Attack for sensitive HTTPS traffic originated from their phone and hence they do have access to clear text information which could include user credentials to various sites such as social networking, banking, credit card information or anything that is sensitive in nature.”

Pandya pointed out how this potentially clashes with Nokia’s privacy statement, which claims: “we do not collect any usernames or passwords or any related information on your purchase transactions, such as your credit card number during your browsing sessions”.

So, does it clash?

Nokia came back today with a statement on the matter, in which it stressed that it takes the privacy and security of its customers and their data very seriously, and reiterated the point of the Xpress Browser’s compression capabilities, namely so that “users can get faster web browsing and more value out of their data plans”.

“Importantly, the proxy servers do not store the content of web pages visited by our users or any information they enter into them,” the company said. “When temporary decryption of HTTPS connections is required on our proxy servers, to transform and deliver users’ content, it is done in a secure manner.

“Nokia has implemented appropriate organizational and technical measures to prevent access to private information. Claims that we would access complete unencrypted information are inaccurate.”

To paraphrase: we decrypt your data, but trust us, we don’t peek. Which is, in a way, fair enough. After all, they need to decrypt the data in order to de-bulk it.

The issue here seems to be around how Nokia informs – or fails to inform – its customers of what’s going on. For example, look at Opera. The messaging around Opera Mini is pretty clear: the browser’s FAQs spell out how it routes traffic. Although you can find out about the Xpress Browser’s equivalent functionality with a bit of online searching, it’s far less explicit to the average user. And this is particularly unfortunate given that the browser is installed by default — people won’t necessarily choose it based on those data-squeezing chops.

And it looks like Nokia belatedly recognizes that fact. The statement continued:

“We aim to be completely transparent on privacy practices. As part of our policy of continuous improvement we will review the information provided in the mobile client in case this can be improved.”

The moral of the story is that those who want absolute security in their mobile browsing should probably steer clear of browsers that compress to cut down on data. Even if Nokia isn’t tapping into that data – and there is no reason to suspect that it is – the very existence of that feature will be a turn-off for the paranoid, and reasonably so. And that’s why Nokia should be up-front about such things.

UPDATE: A kind soul has reminded me that, unlike Xpress Browser and Opera Mini, two other services that also do the compression thing leave HTTPS traffic unperturbed, namely Amazon with its Silk browser and Skyfire. This is arguably how things should be done, although it does of course mean that users don’t get speedier loading and so on on HTTPS pages.

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We’re not talking the glory days of old, but bear in mind that the third quarter of last year saw the division shed an unholy €683 million ($895 million). Before today’s preliminary results for the fourth quarter, analysts were warning that people shouldn’t get too hopeful about the Finnish firm returning to profitability anytime soon.

But then:

“Nokia now estimates that Devices & Services has exceeded expectations and achieved underlying profitability in the fourth quarter 2012.

- Mobile Phones business unit and Lumia portfolio delivered better than expected results; and
- Operating expenses were lower than expected.
- Devices & Services non-IFRS operating margin for the fourth quarter 2012 now expected to be between break even and positive 2 percent.”

Net sales within Devices & Services totalled €3.9 billion for the quarter. The biggest sellers were, unsurprisingly, the really low-end Series 40 phones, which sold 70.3 million units. However, the company also sold 15.9 million smartphones: 9.3 million Asha full-touch handsets, 2.2 million Symbian smartphones and a cool 4.4 million Windows Phone-based Lumia smartphones.

Better-than-expected sales of Lumias and low-end devices were only part of the picture, though – lower-than-expected operating expenses also helped.

Nokia Siemens Networks also beat expectations in the fourth quarter, achieving underlying profitability for the third consecutive quarter. That said, “seasonality and competitive environment” will likely weaken profitability in both divisions this quarter, Nokia noted.

Stephen Elop is delighted, as would I be if I were him. After all, this was a man whose decision to bail on the ‘burning platform’ that is Symbian led some embittered ex-Nokians to brand him the “world’s worst CEO”.

“We are pleased that Q4 2012 was a solid quarter where we exceeded expectations and delivered underlying profitability in Devices & Services and record underlying profitability in Nokia Siemens Networks,” he said in a statement. “We focused on our priorities and as a result we sold a total of 14 million Asha smartphones and Lumia smartphones while managing our costs efficiently, and Nokia Siemens Networks delivered yet another very good quarter.”

Finalized results will come out later this month, but the preliminaries have already sent up Nokia’s share price a whopping 16 percent on the Frankfurt stock exchange.

Of course, it’s too early to call this a full turnaround, but it’s certainly a slap in the face for those predicting Nokia’s imminent demise.

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After a year in which the site was embroiled in a huge child protection scandal, lost many of its users and laid off staff, it chose the turn of the calendar as its moment to announce that CEO Paul LaFontaine was stepping down.

LaFontaine had only been in the job for a year or so, but in a blog post, LaFontaine bade a kind farewell to the community, referring obliquely to the abuse scandal and outlining the site’s biggest problem: low engagement.

The voice of the community is the strength of the community. Proof of this was clear in the summer. The community weathered a tremendous storm together, and Habbos stood strong. The way you reacted with one strong voice was inspiring.   You will be left in good hands. Our new Community Team will lead Staff in the Hotel to serve you. Engagement will increase, and the spirit of Old Habbo will rise again.

But his message hardly reflects the extent of the scandal — which led investors to drop the company — or the depth of the challenge facing the site.

Around half of Habbo’s active user base appears to have departed in the last year, causing a dramatic reaction inside the business. In the fall, Habbo decided to reposition itself as a platform for games, laying off 60 staff in the process. Changes were long overdue, but in the wake of the scandal they felt like panic. However, at least under LaFontaine it had some strategic experience in the field — he had come to Habbo from running ops and distribution at Playdom, the online game developer bought by Disney for $763 million in 2010.

LaFontaine’s post is being taken, for the time being, by Markku Ignatius (he’s the one on the right) — a long-time employee who was previously the company’s head of legal affairs and corporate communications. He will have had a busy 12 months, no doubt, but the jury is out on whether his experience will help Habbo navigate its transition to the tricky world of games.

But turning to Ignatius does not mean that the site’s owners are simply turning to old Habbo hands for guidance. He’s only acting CEO, and if it were simply that Sulake wanted to turn the clock back it would not have also lost CTO Markus Halttunen, an eight-year veteran, also appears to have departed, along with other staff who go back more than a decade. These changes are perhaps not a surprise, as the company was cutting a huge percentage of jobs, but it does show that the axe is falling on new staff and old.

The thing is, a shakeup may be the only way to try and save this situation — because all of Habbo’s problems are of its own making. Its woeful moderation allowed sexual predators to roam free around a site intended for kids and teens, and the product failed to change as the online world altered radically over the past few years. It may look at 2012 as its annus horribilis, but right now the question must be whether 2013 can really be any better.

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NSN’s goal is to transform itself from a bloated multi-platform multi-technology telecom vendor into a lean, mean mobile broadband machine. Last year, the joint venture between Nokia and Siemens started selling off any business non-core to its 4G ambitions and announced plans to shed 17,000 employees, a quarter of its workforce. It started by coughing up its backhaul and wireline access units, and it even dumped the WiMAX business it inherited form Motorola. While WiMAX is technically 4G, NSN is focusing solely on LTE.

The BSS unit produces software and hardware carriers use to handle all of the complex business operations of running a huge network with millions of customers, ranging from real-time charging for service to fielding customer complaint tickets. Redknee is a specialist in such technology and is likely acquiring NSN’s business to gain its 130 carrier customers. About 1,200 NSN employees will transfer over to Redknee, primarily in Germany, India and Poland.

As we noted Monday, NSN’s obsession with LTE seems to paying off. In the last year, its won some key Asian contracts, and last quarter it posted record profits.

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Formed in Finland late 2010 by Petri Rajha and tested mostly in Scandinavia until recently, the service is a mobile app through which users offer their photos for sale and through which media organisations can post paid photo assignments for users.

User submissions typically sell for around €17 ($22) whilst media entities typically set prices of €10 to €20 for “tasks”; Scoopshot takes a 30 percent cut.

CEO Niko Ruokosuo, an ex LA Times journalist, tells paidContent the service includes authentication that could help news publishers identify fake pictures:

“It works by having control of the image. When the image is captured with Scoopshot it is sent to us and no longer resides on the originating camera. It is impossible to edit those photos and that same exact file exists nowhere else, we guarantee that.

“Second, we know the exact GPS location and time where that photo was taken. It adds a level of security. We know the sender.”

These techniques aren’t necessarily fool-proof — not least because, as #FakeSandy showed, few such images typically come through formalised citizen-news services as much as they do through an array of social accounts and blogs.

“I wouldn’t trust a robot to do the job,” Stephen Sidlo, a breaking news picture editor for rival UGC service Demotix, which was acquired by Corbis this month, tells paidContent.

“Research on UGC verification manually is necessary, the rest can be manipulated.”

Likewise, Associated Press recently named Fergus Bell its social media and UGC editor after he constructed a similar human verification process for UGC atop the AP’s existing checks and balances.

“We can’t verify something unless we speak to the person that created it, in most cases,” Bell told Poynter last week. “When it comes to UGC, we only put stuff out when we can confirm it.”

Even the humans on social networks themselves seemed to do a good job of debunking fake Sandy images.

Still, Ruokosuo says Scoopshot also supports human editor checks on contributors. “Typically, we have their name and phone number. Editorial people in charge can actually contact those people for further information or verification.”

Regardless, Scoopshot’s main business line may not be news after all. Ruokosuo says the outfit has sold on 160,000 photos on its members’ behalf, but the majority are to online directory sites to accompany pages like restaurant reviews.

And already Scoopshot is extending its platform to brands for marketing, as well as editors for news. Fiat recently set Finnish members a Scoopshot task, through an advertising agency, to photograph its Fiat 500 car on city streets, resulting in 1,054 submissions.

But the outfit is also launching Scoopshot Pro, providing news editors with a sub-set of only professional photographer members whom to assign to events around the world.

“You can send assignments to professional photographers all over the world using the same interface in a matter of minutes – for example, in Gaza to cover your content needs,” Ruokosuo says.

News editors are often apprehensive about assigning amateurs and pro-ams on assignment to dangerous jobs. But Scoopshot claims 60 media partners are using the service including Finland’s Sanoma, Metro International, Time Out UK and Finnish public broadcaster YLE.

“We are definitely aware of the risks related to that,” CEO Ruokosuo says. “We would never encourage behavour that puts people at risk.”

What’s next? “We have identified a few key markets and are hoping to make some press releases about that in future. We are in a funding round that is looking good and should be closed soon.”

Scoopshot hired Dave Rickley, a senior editor at the Los Angeles Times, as north America EVP this month for its U.S. expansion.

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Futureful has been under rather stealthy development for two years, and the team is backed and mentored by Skype co-founder Janus Friis. It’s a bit like StumbleUpon, in that it’s an app that contains a browser (as opposed to being a browser – you can’t enter a URL) and is designed to help the user find new content.

However, Futureful is all about semantic tagging and artificial intelligence. As you browse, the app presents subject tags in a row at the top – click on a tag, and you get taken to another related page with its own set of tags. So, clicking on a ‘Silicon Valley’ tag may take you to a tech story, with the fresh tags above it including something like ‘Moore’s Law’. It basically provides an intelligent chain of content discovery.

What’s more – and here it really differs from StumbleUpon, in my experience – you never see the same content twice.

“It’s a new way to consume content,” co-founder Marko Anderson said. “We want the interface to be as simple and fluid as possible. Based on my usage of the service, I get very different things coming to me. If I choose ‘Silicon Valley’ and somebody else does too, the content might be different.”

I’ve not yet had a chance to play with the beta extensively, and of course it would take significant usage before it’s possible to evaluate how successful the algorithms are, but – if it works – Futureful could be a great way to kill time and learn new things. If you’re an iPad user, of course.

As Anderson pointed out, “mobile devices aren’t great for typing”. Add to that the need for enough space to show the tag row, and it makes sense that Futureful is launching as a tablet app.

“We started with web development, but the tablet is the ultimate consumption device, where the information finds you,” Anderson told me. “We haven’t ruled out a web version, but the smoothness in terms of the cleanness of the UI has just been better on the tablet.”

And Android? “We have no plans yet, but we have had some of the biggest players in the mobile industry ask us to build for them.” Same goes for the iPhone – maybe in the future, but first things first.

Also, there’s no business model yet. That said, if Futureful takes off I’d imagine there would be many options for making money off it.

Here’s a video:

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