The deal is an interesting one. Nokia is selling its 517,000 square foot headquarters in Espoo, Finland to Finnish company Exilion for a sum of 170 million Euros ($222 million). However, this does not mean that the cell phone maker will be out of house and home. Instead, Nokia has already signed a long-term lease with Exilion to keep occupying Nokia House as the principal tenant.

It’s not clear how much Nokia will be paying in rent, but you can see how selling their headquarters can help with the cash flow. They get over $200 million in hand right now and then slowly leak that money back in the form of lease payments. That will free up some cash to push the Windows Phone effort with Microsoft, particularly when it comes to the flagship Lumia 920. After all, that’s being widely touted as the best (and most popular) Windows Phone 8 device.

The sale of the Espoo property should be completed by the end of this year. “As we have said before, owning real estate is not part of Nokia’s core business and when good opportunities arise we are willing to exit these types of non-core assets,” said Nokia CFO Timo Ihamuotila. “We are naturally continuing to operate in our head office building on a long-term basis.”

[Source]

The post Nokia Espoo HQ Sold for $222 Million, Nokia Intends to Stay appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

Finnish designers have created the Valkee device, a portable solarium light that shines in your ears and claims to overcome seasonal depressions from the lack of sunlight during short winter days.

The invention is based around the assertion that not only are our visual systems photosensitive, but so is our brain. More specifically, there are apparently 18 sites in our brains, where OPN3 photoreceptor proteins are located. These regions will supposedly react favorably to exposure to light, even when that light is filtered through tissue and bone.

It was claimed as an effective gadget by the group of scientists from Finland’s University of Oulu. In two clinical trials, they had people with severe seasonal affective disorder (SAD) use the device daily, for 8 to 12 minutes a day. Afterward, when those people completed a BDI-21 questionnaire (a standard for assessing depression), it was found that 92 percent of the subjects in the first trial had completely recovered.

Gizmag reports that

The information presented by the company is definitely somewhat difficult to sort out, although it appears that the results of the second trial were similarly encouraging. A placebo group was included in at least one of the trials, to ensure that people weren’t feeling better merely because they expected to.

Placebo group or not, i’m not sold on it. Especially when considering the devices asking price of $294. Sure, there will always be these aficionados of enlighenting their brains in some unusual way. For them, I’d suggest trying to stick a pair of pencil-thin flashlights for $20 deep into your ears. If you have a cold, try your nostrils for the prescribed 8-12 minutes.

The post In-Ear Light Therapy Claims To Overcome SAD appeared first on Mobile Magazine.