Foreca Consulting Ltd is fully owned by Foreca Ltd, the first Finnish privately owned enterprise providing professional weather services, established in 1996. Since the beginning of 2007, subsidiary Foreca Consulting Ltd has been responsible for Foreca Group’s research and development projects, weather and climate consulting and training. Foreca Sverige AB was established in 2001.
Foreca Group employs over 20 experts in meteorology, programming and marketing. Today Foreca is global weather service provider, satisfying needs of more than 300 customers worldwide. Foreca provides weather services for media, and full-scale national 24/7 weather services to the Finnish Road Administration. Foreca serves the largest Finnish energy companies and other industry.
Foreca provides Internet basedweather service for national and global Internet portals, such as Microsoft’s MSN with 450 million potential users. Foreca cooperates closely with major mobile teleoperators, and has developed front line mobile weather services, winning several diplomas in Nokia's competitions.
Throughout its existence, Foreca has been actively involved in many national and European R&D projects, foremost developing telematic weather services. Foreca developed it’s own unique very-high-resolution model and parallel computing system. Foreca is also active in development aid programmes. In 2002-2006 weather services for
Mozambique were developed with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Finland.
Dr. Pirkko Saarikivi, Managing Director of Foreca Consulting Ltd. Innovator and modernizer of weather services in Nordic countries. Received the Award of Innovative Woman Entrepreneur of Europe in 1997. Founder of two companies: a meteorological consultancy Saarikivi Weather & Law Ltd in 1995 and Foreca Ltd in 1996. Coordinator and Project Manager of several international and national research projects developing new meteorological applications and weather services based on latest ITC technologies. Strategic Advisor for European Commission in Telematics/Transport. As COST Technical Committee delegate, coordination and launch of four new COST projects in meteorology. Ten year career as radar meteorologist, radar system engineer, lecturer and scientist at the University of Helsinki. Six years of diverse working experience at the Finnish Meteorological Institute as Head of Weather Service Division, Project Manager, Senior Scientist and duty forecaster.
Dr. Auli Keskinen, Innovation Manager, Consultant for Foreca Consulting. Adjunct Professor at University of Tampere, National Defence University and Finland Futures Research Centre. Director R&D, Ministry of the Environment. Worked as researcher, project director and CEO of Finland Futures Research Centre. Prior work within ICT includes long period for the Finnish Meteorological Institute as IT expert, researcher and senior planner, for Ministry of Finance as senior IT official and as EU Co-ordinator for Finnish Governmental IT, and as IT Administrator, IT Manager and Director, R&D for Ministry of the Environment. She worked as the IT Expert for the EUCO-COST30 Project. She has extensive experience in EU commission's INFSO directorate in various evaluation and expert tasks, and as the panel chair and telematics expert. She has had several Information Society Expert tasks at Finnish Government, working for integration of sustainable development and information society. She is expert and scholar on eDemocracy, Knowledge Society, Foresight Studies and Complexity Research being a Member of the Santa Fe Institute Researcher Family and the EXYSTENCE NoE of EU FET Programme. She leads and acts as consultant in eDemocracy projects and Futures Research Studies at national and EU level. She teaches and lectures frequently on futures and foresight research, e-democracy and information society issues.
Contribution in ROADIDEA:
Foreca Consulting takes care of Project coordination activities, operational and financial management, innovation procedures and management, and project web site management.