Albert II visits the Microsoft innovation centre in Mons
By: Futures
Tags: cloud computing, EMIC, ICT
On 16 June 2009, the King of Belgium, Albert II, visited one of Belgium’s innovation hotspots, the Digital Innovation Valley in Mons. During the visit the King, Walloon Minister for Economy Jean-Claude Marcourt and Mons mayor Elio Di Rupo stopped by the Microsoft Innovation Centre in Mons.
On 16 June 2009, the King of Belgium, Albert II, visited one of Belgium’s innovation hotspots, the Digital Innovation Valley in Mons. During the visit the King, Walloon Minister for Economy Jean-Claude Marcourt and Mons mayor Elio Di Rupo stopped by the Microsoft Innovation Centre in Mons.
The Innovation Centre is the first facility of its kind that Microsoft has established in Belgium in partnership with the Walloon Region. Start-up companies and young entrepreneurs meet there with experts from Microsoft and partners to improve technology and business skills and to further their networks – helping to accelerate their success.
There are many opportunities emerging from the converging infrastructure that appears as “three screens and the cloud” – user interface technologies brought by phone- size screens, PC-size screens and TV-size screens that provide interfaces to the resources in the “back-end” Internet.
The King was particularly excited about the Microsoft Surface (above), a kind of coffee table with a touch screen that allows you to model a three-dimensional human heart...or to play chess with your fingertips.
The Microsoft Innovation Centre, which opened in April this year, is a public–private partnership between Microsoft and the Walloon Region, but it is open to other partners, both public and private.
In the course of the next three years the centre aims to create between five and ten new companies a year, and a total of 250 new jobs. Its initial focus will be on the electronic delivery of healthcare, or eHealth. The centre will share the same building as the new Virtualis operational development centre for computing support.