This Monday Lisbon City Hall hosted the kick-off event for the experimentation phase of the Smart Open Lisboa with great news. The 9 selected startups for the experimentation phase will get free access to Web Summit.
Smart Open Lisboa is a new program that challenges startups to improve the lives of regular citizens, pushing Lisbon towards becoming a smart city. After a week of labouring away with workshops and seminars at the Beta-i offices, the startups will now begin doing the fun stuff as they enter into a 6-week experimentation phase working directly with partners and potential customers validating and testing their solutions. Now they get to see what it all was worth!
Co-founders of Beta-i, Pedro Rocha Vieira and Manuel Tânger, set the tone of event sharing the importance of entrepreneurs claiming that, equipped with the right data and resources, they can develop sustainable solutions to problems faced by our cities.
After some words from the Duarte Cordeiro, vice mayor of Lisbon, the 9 pioneering startups began to showcase their solutions to a packed room of spectators.
Some of these startups include, 360waste, that seeks to create a more efficient way of managing waste collection through the use of sensors in container lids and advanced algorithms to find the best collection route. Anyone who lives in Lisbon knows the pain of the late-night garbage truck and would welcome a better solution!
Another startup that was also part of this list was Fi-Sonic, which seeks to use a network of multi-channel microphones distributed across the city to capture sound. Using this data, they seek to study and monitor the impact of sound in urban environments, with applications including noise monitoring and sound event identification (i.e. identifying people in distress, accidents, etc.)
Luis Araujo, president of Turismo de Portugal, closed the event by stating the importance of pushing Portugal and Portuguese tourism into a new technological grounds.
The next date to look forward to is the Demo day where we will see what the teams have been able to accomplish during the experimentation phase.
This event was made possible by the support of our partners; the Municipality of Lisbon, PT, Cisco, Turismo de Portugal and Startup Lisboa.