Inside Sweden's Silicon Valley

this place seems like make-believe or perhaps the fever dream of a design blogger no one in their right mind would build a hotel in a forest and stick the rooms up in some trees but then again it sort of fits perfectly ah because this is Sweden and the treehouse Hotel booze is sweet its nature fornicating with functional design and creative thinking this is the UFO and really this is why we came to Sweden to get Wi-Fi out here from Stockholm to the Arctic Circle Swedes have pumped out dazzling tech infused products to put a new twist on what it means to be modern entertaining and useful on this episode we're going to find out how this tiny nation ended up as perhaps Europe's premier technology power what's the secret that Sweden figured out that other countries seem to have missed because there's no question that these Swedes are up to weird and wonderful things want proof we'll check out a face whopping robot pretty awesome get up close and personal with a turbine and that would be kind of equivalent to a new clock and pound cinnamon buns with Spotify is Daniel Eck you were going to clubs down and I was thrown out Bhaskar Silicon Valley may be home to some of the biggest tech giants in the world but it's being challenged like never before crazy tech geniuses have popped up all over the planet making things that will blow your mind my name is Ashley Vance I'm an author and journalist and I'm on a quest to find the most innovative tech creations and meet the beautiful freaks behind them hello world okay here's what you probably know about Stockholm it's beautiful it's full of gorgeous unassuming people and it's almost disturbingly clean what you don't know about Stockholm is that outside of Silicon Valley it's the world leader in fostering tech addiction Spotify Skype and the makers of Minecraft and candy crush all got their start here the Swedes these supposedly cool fashion challenged people know how to tap into our desires and make simple things we can't escape I started my journey at epicenter a nerd lounge located in the heart of Stockholm any place trying to establish its tech cred needs a spot like this people come here to fiddle with their robots hash out their techno utopian fantasies over beer and if they're totally nuts insert a chip underneath the skin on their wrists that lets them open the epicentre door hello dad my name is Fahad about those robots my reptile brain is telling me that this thing is alive and then my intellect sells me no I know it's just a piece of plastic and some software we've stumbled upon something really super interesting this is fur hat a promising stab at trying to make mechanical creatures and computer interfaces appear and act more like humans hi my name is Ashley hello Ashley nice to meet you I am a socially intelligent robot it's nice to meet you as well nice shirt thank you we want to build a system that can interact very fluently with humans understand their social signals their emotions their attend attention States there's a phenomenon known as the uncanny valley it's that queasy feeling you get when a robot or computer interface looks real but not real enough the brains behind Ferhat these two hardcore academics think they're on their way to solving that problem and making robots less nauseating we come from a background of human human communications on how humans interact with each other is the social layer that is on top of the typical AI if they can push the technology forward Ferhat could end up as the face of Siri or Amazon's Alexa it might keep lonely people company do you think I look good or be the thing you yell at when checking in for a flight at the airport can you walk us through like each little piece that is main piece here she's got a hat and a wig and a skull and a mouth as far as robots go fur hats design is really simple it's as easy as taking a mask on and off and then the mask is magnetically attached so you can unplug the mask and then you can attach the different masks it's front response to it and then it needs to be calibrated so that you can get the right yeah I do want to see the alien baby what did you say there is a facial animation system you know like the ones you have in games an animated movie yeah so it's all software based and then we use a micro projector to project that animation onto a master you get very accurate eye movement gestures facial expressions lip animation I can look like a woman and sound like a woman like an avatar that's level but I think the world has been really waiting for robots at home to interact with Tokyo to see them in a human natural habitat where we don't see any robots at the moment one day fur hat might read bedtime stories to your kid I'd say it's at the nightmare stage of that journey but the product has gone on sale for use by universities which are busy tweaking it to ensure sweet dreams in the years to come you were boring why would you say that to me you would look strange or to sling insults and handsome TV hosts how about a beer coming up I do the fika thing with Spotify as Daniel a it's not to get for help and we'll break the Swedish code of conduct that when I drink it Sweden's rise as a tech power did not happen by accident the country's advanced industrialization is due largely to Swedish invention like the dial telephone and to high standards of Engineering starting in the late 1990s the government made a huge investment in broadband laying fiber optic cables throughout the country then it began subsidizing pcs so every citizen could have a modern computer with a superfast internet connection but this wasn't all about making a sterile nerd Factory the Swedes also designed their education system to emphasize creativity and experimentation and to mix the Arts and Sciences one curious offshoot of the social engineering was that Sweden created a nation of pirates that generation of tech infused youngsters set out to pirate software music movies anything really and did so with astonishing skill file-sharing services like Kazaa and utorrent started here and so did an entire political party literally called the pirate party one of the Pirates was this bald beauty Daniel lack Iran Hey yes let's see you back ran utorrent and ended up on the wrong side of the music labels then he pulled a 180 and decided to try and become the music industry's Savior by starting a new less Deeley company Spotify it was Swedish simplicity the turn Spotify into a huge hit people could find stream and download songs with such ease that neither consumers nor the labels could resist the service almost every morning X stops off at saternus a trendy cafe in the oyster mom neighborhood of Stockholm here he engages in fika a Swedish snacking ritual that takes place a few times a day should we dig in dig in please like him it was good it's it's um seems more wholesome than like a Cinnabon yeah so you got it set off on the path of doing tacking music so really the only thing that was important in my family was that you'd learn how to play music I got a guitar when I was like three four okay but yeah I got the computer when I was like five and for me like in the beginning it was really all about games just fun playing from that point I kind of realized like hey these games are boring how hard would it be to try to fix the game yeah and so I started coding games when I was seven or eight there's some point I it's kind of amazing that you've been on this trajectory yeah you know your whole life yeah I've never had a normal job when I grew up like I didn't realize how you've made money starting something yourself we're investing money or life that was just the totally foreign concept outside of Silicon Valley Sweden has the highest per capita number of unicorns which are startups valued over 1 billion dollars there's a tension that comes with all this new money and fame like much of Scandinavia Sweden operates under a cultural code of conduct known as Ianto law it's a philosophy that demands people not think too highly of themselves I was wondering if people recognize you out on the street um yeah I mean they do but because this is like Sweden no one really comes up except if it's like 10:00 p.m. and they've had a beer or two cut to 2016 and this way of living finds itself in conflict with tech millionaires boozing it up at clubs and hyping their tight laughs AK knows the situation as well as anyone by the time you're 21 I mean you were a millionaire especially right because you had sold a couple businesses and now I'm very well for yourself and then it sounds like you went through sort of a period where I don't know if showing off is the right word but you were living oh yeah going to clubs and and I was driving past cars when I look back to it I'm sort of almost ashamed of myself because it was like you know it was today I realized there was a huge sort of period of insecurity there's a lot of fun don't get me wrong but it's it's like not Who I am and I never know like as an outsider if we make too much of all this but this idea that you don't want to stand out and yeah I'm Sweden or Scandinavia and you do stand out what yeah when you start making billions dollars a little hard yeah but it is changing I mean if you walk around in the city now like I see like Ferraris Lamborghinis like there's quite a lot of that here which is not really part of what the fabric of how it used to be to really contemplate yann to LA I took part in another Swedish tradition known as standing pensively against a wall completely aware that I was being photographed for my own TV show we're supposed to pull your head here are some of the rules of yan to lie you are not to think you're anything special you are not to think you're as good as we are you're not to think you're smarter than we are you're not to convince yourself that you're better than we are you're not to think you know more than we do not to think you're more important than you're not to think you're good at anything not to laugh at us you're not to think anyone cares about you you're not to think you can teach us anything ah that was refreshing with the brainwashing portion of the program over it was time to live a little we decided to get out of the cold dine at a traditional Swedish restaurant and then hit the town it'll be just gonna be getting yours I'm Ashley thank you Henrik all right Maria oh the promise country I'll tell you this about yah Allah it gives way after a few cocktails what to mix this with the lemon and the old smelly I don't know what it's cold in Sweden economy fish yeah it's now we're up steps yeah nah Jerry that's whatever gets me cuz they're just yeah my food is that out and that's when the other part of the Swedish character the friendly joyfully lubricated part goes on full display hey ho vote a snail fun marine attended go near the end of the night it was time for my famous disappearing cigarette magic trick I guess it and my man bun needs some work coming up I'll find out where my embarrassing photos live this is where all the action happens and beat a turbine named Esther as vibrant as the startup scene is in stockholm sweden x' technology muscle lies in the northern part of the country had 560 miles up from stockholm and you'll end up in lou leo a picturesque city of 70,000 people wedged between the gulf of bothnia and the arctic circle for centuries lou leo has been a cultural an economic hub of this region but what really has Lou Leo buzzing these days is the arrival of Facebook which opened a data center on the outskirts of the city in 2013 at 300,000 square feet it's one of the largest computer centers ever built it's the kind of place you need a bike and a picnic lunch to explore fully and while you're on that picnic lunch you can take a selfie and post it here go it's nice to see you again I actually want to come to do thank you and welcome to Facebook you'll Sjogren's has managed the operations at the Lully OData plant since it opened he offered to show us the guts of this beastly building some people think the cloud is actually a cloud for others it's an ethereal mystery the place where your photos and documents get sucked to and hang out this though is the cloud at least the physical manifestation of it it's thousands of servers and storage systems working together to hold our information this is where all the action happens this is where all our photos are like this is really where Facebook is actually running look around see over there it's a picture of a young Ashley Vance who thought that going blonde would be a good idea and that one it's a lingering poke from your creepy ex and right there is an inspirational meme helping lift people's spirits where does my mom find all these amazing quotes and because we've built the infrastructure to be so redundant we can basically pull any server and it's not going to affect any end user in in any negative way so we pull one out here okay so we're going to take down Facebook a typical Monday measure but it's all built to be as energy and cooling efficient as possible so there are no fans at all on this one as you can see they're sort of it's just working on the pressure difference that forces here through I think for most people who've never been to a data center they're usually like these big sort of pizza box things with tons of fans and moving parts going on them and you guys compacted everything down if the industry in general started adopting a lot more of this thinking it could really change the whole industry and not just Facebook a couple of corridors we'll go through a typical data center relies on massive air-conditioning units to pump cool air onto tens of thousands of computers you can't pay for this kind of wind blowing lucky Facebook is too hip for that ketchup it uses cool arctic air to keep its photo friend and like machines from melting down this whole place lends itself to Sweden's meticulous attention to detail and design the building is an engineering marvel that treats air like a pampered Corgi poo the air gets sucked in cleaned watered and then sent on its way via physics with the building pressure pushing the air down onto the computers since facebook gives away its service for free this place needs to operate as smoothly and cheaply as possible to minimize the cost of each click off camera you'll readily brags about Facebook's cheap clicks on camera Yan Tala we've kind of been dodging around the point I mean this may be the world's was the fish power efficient data center is most likely one of the most efficient ones damn Swedish modesty it's not just free cold air that brought Facebook to the Arctic Circle the social network also came for the cheap reliable power produced by Sweden's vast set of hydroelectric dams starting in 1910 the Swedes began building a network of two dozen hydroelectric dams along the Lulay River today the dams provide more than enough power to meet all of northern Sweden's needs so now we will start to urinate Lu the river on Lu the river power Rick Abramson and Kristi Lungren worked for Vattenfall the energy giant that runs the dams they were kind enough to take me on a road trip to see up close how these amazing machines work these guys insist that it's wonderful living in the great frigid north they can check out the Northern Lights from their hot tubs spend months in total darkness and hunt bears and moose so Rick did you already go moose hunting this year then the small hunting ground where I'm caught there's only one grown up in one cough and the first morning 30 minutes into the hunt they shot the big one nothing's over and everyone's done walk me through again like how many dams there are a long sister will do that we have 15 power stations along this river of course with great power comes great responsibility and you know stuff to placate people they care about nature and fish we are one of the Lord you should have fish breeders in Sweden to compensate for the fact that we built all the power stations because they the settlement cannot sort of pass through the river system now so the energy company breeds sailing yeah we do how many would you have to put back in for yeah in the Rue de Rivoli put back close to half a million every year well it used to take hundreds of people to run these dams but today they're controlled by two easygoing Swedes working in this command center from here we controlled the complete river system 15 power stations and we have two guys here who controls to go complete River that's what seems incredible raise the two people would handle half a country's power yeah you could essentially turn on a turbine and shut off a turbine and so today that's all done through software yeah on the rest of our journey today we'll get to go and see some of the absolutely you're gonna see the biggest one we have in Sweden and that would be kind of equivalent to any other block okay yeah I know we're 90 neutral box Vonn fall has turbines of all sizes some of them like this big beauty named Esther now you see the size of it yeah George produces much power as a nuclear reactor there we go this is what you've been waiting this feels like the seconds before a shuttle loan it says really I've been to a couple yeah how long does it take to get up to full speed here comes the water standing next to one of these turbines when it fires up is one of life's great organ rattling pleasures the closer you get the more manly you feel for some 250 cubic meters a second in the courtroom after getting my organs rattled I decided to head back to Lou leo and decompress damn what a day it's been a long but awesome week in Sweden somehow we ended up near the Arctic Circle with a campfire it's our lucky day I've been to Sweden a few times and this trip confirmed my previous impressions about the country these are pleasant people who are remarkably good at making things everyone wants but what's more impressive these days is the way in which the Swedes are embracing technology the people here try harder than anyone else to find a balance between striving for a bright future while living within their means and then you know cinnamon buns on the next episode of hello world we go to Israel where I float in the Dead Sea is a technique doeth hop in a jet and build a space laboratory seems hard to believe that you could do that much science and something besides you

Channel: Bloomberg Originals

Views: 426,145

Keywords: Bloomberg, Hello World, Sweden, Stockholm, Stockholm startup, Spotify, Daniel Ek, green energy, wind turbine, wind energy, data center, tech, tech news, Silicon Valley, Ashlee Vance, elon musk

Id: d915p1aXlkE

Length: 23min 26sec (1406 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 27 2016