Nowadays we can connect to the Internet in a great many places: at home, at work, in cafés, airports etc. And we are starting to become accustomed to all the services and applications that being connected provides in our everyday lives. Connecting vehicles is a natural step that will provide numerous advantages. These benefits will include bringing the more traditional applications (Web surfing, e-mail access or multimedia downloads) to our car seat, connecting the many devices that we already have installed in our cars (onboard computers, music and video players, sensors etc) to the Internet to stay up to date and inform us of possible problems, or arranging an appointment with the garage automatically when needed.

Prof. Dr. Nicholas Maxemchuk takes up position as Chief Researcher at IMDEA Networks.

The expertise of Spanish research groups are beginning to spill over into the private sector thanks to new European initiatives. Projects, such as EUROINGENIO and IMDEA Networks, which promote the mutual and continuous exchange of knowledge, are transferring to Spanish companies the tremendous success that has recently been observed in its R&D sector.

We live in a globalised world in which the generation of knowledge is the essential raw material for the creation of wealth. This fact, so often repeated, is so evident that developing countries such as China and India already invest as much as developed countries in the generation of new scientific knowledge. They are developing structures to transform this knowledge into technology, which later will be applied by businesses in new processes, products and services considered innovative by the markets.