The Durban conference also witnessed agreement on the structure of the Green Climate Fund, a vehicle of assistance for the developing world to adopt environment-friendly technologies and adapt to climate change. Industrialised nations must now match rhetoric with solid action to raise the $100 billion that will be needed yearly for the fund from 2020.

For the first time, the US, India and China, who make up almost half of the world’s emissions, have agreed to cut emissions as part of a legal treaty. Xie Zhenhua, China’s top climate negotiator, said that China is willing to shoulder responsibilities in line with its development and capability as long as the legal framework after 2020 will comply with the principles of “common but differentiated” responsibilities.

The technology behind CheerLights starts with monitoring Twitter for keywords. Anyone wanting to control the lights can tweet to the @cheerlights account along with one of 10 colours – red, green, blue, cyan, white, warm white, purple, magenta, yellow and orange. Scharler gathers the tweets up and lets others get hold of the last colour using the ThingSpeak API. You can check up on the last colour here.

To connect the data relating to the last colour to the lights, it requires a combination of Arduino and ioBridge. A controller that subscribes to the “cheerlights” keyword receives the latest colour command and sets the colour on your lights. Arduino can be used to signal the lights, and ioBridge provides the web connectivity.

There is an Android app which displays the colours, a Chrome widget which shows the colour in the top left of the browser and a web widget which adds it to a webpage.

This Garage was founded two years ago, after a group of students at Aalto University visited MIT for a class trip. They were attracted by the culture of start-ups at the university and thought of importing it to Finland. Now, this space is one of the largest student groups in Europe, with partnerships with Stanford and cities across Russia and the Baltics.

One of the initiatives which takes place at the Garage is Startup Sauna, a non-profit seed accelerator programme funded by the University, which helps promising young teams in northern Europe to develop their ideas for a new company. 15 to 20 teams are selected to take part in an intensive six-week training programme at the Garage. After this period, the top three teams are offered seed money of 5,000 euros, office space for six months and even given the opportunity to fly to Silicon Valley, or anywhere else in the United States, to forge connections out there.

For example, one of the programme’s success stories is Campalyst, currently based in New York, which has developed a proprietary algorithm for working out if social media is actually delivering a profitable return on investment for a company.