In Helsinki Virtual Village, your cell phone is a broadband browser, a smart wallet, and a passport to the wireless community of the future. And your fellow citizens are the content, 24 hours a day.

Sonera and a consortium of businesspeople, academics, and city planners are collaborating to create Arabianranta, the world's first wireless community. The Helsinki suburb is planned to be a tech hub with some 12,000 residents and 700 IT companies by 2010.

But Arabianranta is to be much more than another tech-heavy urban development. Alongside the physical community will be the wireless Helsinki Virtual Village (HVV), developed by Digia. HVV will include a wide range of broadband services including programs for managing interest clubs, syncronizing schedules with other residents, and archiving, searching, and organizing documents.

Already some analysts are predicting conflict between HVV users and administrators over issues of privacy. The HVV software creates profiles by tracking users' online activity, which in the case of HVV is virtually 24/7.

"If we misuse user profiling, that could really kill [HVV]," said IBM Nordic's Lönnqvist. "If you don't provide added value to me as a consumer, I will say no to user profiling. You will not be allowed to track me. I think that is one of the key checks and balances for the future."

Other organizations involved with HVV include IBM, Symbian, Nokia, ADC Helsinki, and the Finnish Ministry of Technology. HVV is expected to go live when the first residents of Arabianranta move in this summer.