Why is Stockholm, a capital city with a population less than one million, home to global brands such as Skype, Spotify, Klarna and Minecraft? "I think it has to do with the Swedish creed," says Ben Eliass, CEO of bodycare brand Estrid. "It's a nation which put emphasis on high-quality education and invested heavily in telecoms infrastructure in the nineties, so we all grew up with high-speed internet." "It allows people to take high risk and start companies, not needing to be too afraid of the downsides," says Max Junestrand, CEO of legaltech startup Leya. Indeed, Sweden has now produced more unicorns per capita than any other country in Europe, except for Estonia, earning a reputation as the Silicon Valley of Europe"Stockholm has a truly unique ecosystem where you can stand on the shoulders of giants," says Colin Treseler, CEO of Supernormal.

Accurate mid-term (weeks to one year) hourly electricity load forecasts are essential for strategic decision-making in power plant operation, ensuring supply security and grid stability, and energy trading. While numerous models effectively predict short-term (hours to a few days) hourly load, mid-term forecasting solutions remain scarce. In mid-term load forecasting, besides daily, weekly, and annual seasonal and autoregressive effects, capturing weather and holiday effects, as well as socio-economic non-stationarities in the data, poses significant modeling challenges. To address these challenges, we propose a novel forecasting method using Generalized Additive Models (GAMs) built from interpretable P-splines and enhanced with autoregressive post-processing. This model uses smoothed temperatures, Error-Trend-Seasonal (ETS) modeled non-stationary states, a nuanced representation of holiday effects with weekday variations, and seasonal information as input. The proposed model is evaluated on load data from 24 European countries. This analysis demonstrates that the model not only has significantly enhanced forecasting accuracy compared to state-of-the-art methods but also offers valuable insights into the influence of individual components on predicted load, given its full interpretability. Achieving performance akin to day-ahead TSO forecasts in fast computation times of a few seconds for several years of hourly data underscores the model's potential for practical application in the power system industry.

PARIS (Reuters) - France and Germany are to make proposals in the coming months to invest public money in data storage facilities in order to wean Europe off of foreign centers and spur artificial intelligence investment, France's finance minister said on Wednesday. France's Bruno Le Maire said the investments would be based on a recent joint initiative to finance the development of batteries, which France and Germany want in order to avoid becoming dependent on Chinese batteries. "We will make proposals with Germany in the coming months to invest public money in data storage for artificial intelligence so that European data is protected," Le Maire told journalists on the sidelines of an annual end-of-summer business forum. German Economy Minister Peter Altmaier said that Europe had fallen behind and that alternative had to be found in order not to become dependent on U.S. and Chinese companies. "We have an interest in Europe to keep our data in Europe. We have an interest in creating sovereign data structures," Altmaier said at the same conference.

JUDY WOODRUFF: In the Netherlands, voters head to the polls tomorrow, in Europe's first big and closely watched election of the year. An ardent nationalist, running on an anti-immigrant agenda, is bidding for the prime minister's office, hoping to lead the way for similar candidates in France and Germany. The election also comes amid an escalating war of words between the Dutch government and Turkey over a referendum next month that could give President Recep Tayyip Erdogan vast new powers. Just today, Erdogan accused Dutch troops of complicity in the 1995 massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica. That's a charge which a Dutch court had previously cleared.

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display