Lisbon is getting smarter. Haven’t you noticed?
It’s been two weeks since Smart Open Lisboa 2017, the biggest open innovation program directly connected to the city, came to an end. In the second, remastered and more extended edition the finalist startups had the amazing opportunity to validate their solutions in real time and in real environment contributing to the upgrade of city life.
The partners of the program, Lisbon City Council, Tourism of Portugal, Cisco, Altice, Sharing Cities, Grow, Masai, EPAL & Beta-i chose to focus on 4 intervention fields called challenges: Tourism & Culture, Mobility, Citizen Engagement and Sustainability.
During the Demo Day, our teams presented the learnings they got from the whole program, the results of the Experimentation and their next steps.
On the Tourism challenge, AppyFans, a gamification app that serves as a personal assistant for local shopping, managed to establish a collaboration with 10 of the central stores from the Lojas com história network and they are about to extend this number beyond the program. Go WiFi, the largest network in Portugal of around 200 free wifi hotspots also joined their platform. Following Lisbon, they closed a partnership with the Association of Merchants of Porto to market the platform of their 2.000 associates.
In the area of Sustainability, GreenbyWeb after installing their product Aquamote, a smart irrigation system, in the green spaces of Avenida da Liberdade and Praça de Espanha achieved 71% water savings. While they still have their controllers operating there, they will soon install also in Martim Moniz gardens and they are in contacts with other city councils in Portugal.
Our finalist Trigger Systems with their dedicated IoT platform & apps deployed different solutions for city efficiency and control. Their ongoing irrigation pilot in Jardim de Estrela achieved to decrease water consumption and workforce. The installation of LoRa smart meter controllers at the offices of our partner EPAL facilitated the analytics of consumption data and alerts, among other things. Finally, at Rossio square they installed fountain controllers for the people to interact with through a QR code.
In Mobility, the startup KLC with an electric shared mobility solution for companies has been running a pilot with Card4B (member of the MASAI platform), which will continue for 2 months more. Meanwhile they are getting useful feedback from the users and finalising their mobile app that will mainly permit fleet management, plus having other helpful features.
On the way to increase road safety SOSplus collaborated with Civil Protection & Firemen headquarters and installed their tracker device on 7 ambulances. In this way, they were able to get their first users/drivers, improve their app and at the same time learn first hand the needs of their client. Among their future plans is to integrate into third party apps.
Regarding intelligent transport systems Connect Robotics, a drone delivery service for different kinds of goods, thanks to the interactions with the Partners during the program has discovered various areas of operations. Although they didn’t manage so far to get permissions for the city flights, they got a lot of learnings on the risks they need to consider and they are now working on a collaboration with Europe University for the transport of books & docs.
Another case of product development & useful learnings is Openly, on the Citizen engagement challenge; a search engine to find instantly any governmental info or service. During the Experimentation they made connections with different public initiatives of Lisbon’s City Council, which helped them understand the landscape and test the first versions of their product. Now the bigger picture for them is to organise world’s governance information and so far they have mapped local info of 86 countries and collected around 200K government sources.
As we are always aiming to be better on the work we deliver at Beta-i and take every challenge as a learning opportunity, we are now redesigning the new edition of Smart Open Lisboa program. Watch out for the coming updates on our website.
Watch all the emotion for yourself here.