by aristeasapera | Dec 7, 2017 | Corporates, Investors, Startups
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.
by dboonstra | Sep 14, 2016 | Uncategorized
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.
by maria | Jul 4, 2016 | Uncategorized
Last Friday and Saturday we had the Smart Open Lisboa Hackathon at Fundação das Comunicações, where in just 2 days the startups had to build a product using the open data the partners provided.
We literally felt that history was being made… this is the first open data and smart cities program in Lisbon, and the possibilities are endless.
However, even though during those 2 days we all had a blast, this hackathon had a very specific purpose. Together with all the partners involved we had to choose only 8 startups for the next phase of the program.
Tough choice, like always. But in the end these were the winners that will get to test their solutions in real life, starting in September:
eKoneksa
E-derly
Optishower
ET Concept
Load Interactive
Pedalada
Medcore
Bclose
Congratulations to all and thanks to all the others who took the challenge of improving the city of Lisbon and the lives of millions of people. See you in September!
by guest | Jun 29, 2016 | Uncategorized
Rui Brás Fernandes, CTO at Cisco Portugal, writes about how all the startups and developers can make the most of Cisco’s tools and resources to foster innovation and bring new solutions to the table. As one of the founding partners of the Smart Open Lisboa these technologies will be available for the teams participating in this project that aims to redefine and improve the city life in Lisbon.
Digital transformation is here. With less than 1 percent of things in the physical world connected to the Internet, there is an incredible opportunity to connect the unconnected, creating vast opportunities for the Internet of Things (IoT) to transform businesses and industries by re-inventing business processes, operational efficiencies and customer service innovations.
No company can do it alone. We need to grow an ecosystem of digital transformation solutions and partners, but this depends on everyone’s participation. On our side, Cisco aims to be at the forefront of innovation and we can best do that by discovering the next generation of startups that will partner with us.
Let’s look at the picture:
- Cisco is an innovation engine, with more than 170 acquisitions over 30 years plus an annual investment of 5,9B$ in internal R&D.
- Cisco is, and has always been, looking into market transitions and disruptive technologies that impact the world.
- While the world is becoming more collaborative, more dynamic and more open, Cisco is also opening its traditional Network world to this new paradigm
- Technologies like Cloud, SDN, Big Data and Analytics provide new tools to develop solutions and applications based on traditional or new business models and Cisco is making these tools available and “consumable”.
So, what do we have to offer you?
Following this commitment to innovation, in 2014 Cisco launched an initiative called DevNet to make a shift to this new world. DevNet is Cisco’s developer and innovation program, where we give developers the learning and coding resources needed to develop with Cisco platforms and APIs.
How can DevNet help?
- DevNet’s learning and coding resources are available at http://developer.cisco.com.
- DevNet Learning Labs are free, self-paced labs that help people learn coding 101 (with REST, JSON, XML, and python) or networking 101 as well as deep dive into Cisco APIs ranging from collaboration to software-defined networking and work with open source. You have to register to use the Learning Labs, but all the Learning Labs are free.
- The DevNet Sandbox is a place for developers to code on real Cisco kit, ranging from live networks to contact centers. Jump in and code on real kit!
- DevNet Labs is a place to showcase DevNet Innovations made by Cisco and by DevNet developers. Take a look at the innovations that exist, or submit your own innovation.
And what Technologies can I use in the Smart Open Lisboa Hackaton?
Cisco is one of SOL founding members and will be looking for disruptive ventures that harness the power of the intelligent network in the Four Challenge areas by developing synergies with the Cisco solutions such as:
by natacha | Jun 24, 2016 | Uncategorized
[fusion_text]“Grrr.. I’m done with changing tires because these streets are mined with holes!”
“I could really use this food app right now to search for a nice local place to eat but can’t waste any more mobile data… Is it possible that, in the 21st century, we still don’t have internet access on city center?”
“How is it possible that, operating in Lisbon (claimed to be one of the sunniest cities in the world), I’m spending such an important amount of my company’s budget paying high electricity bills?”
SMART OPEN LISBOA – the opportunity to fix your daily pains
Ever wondered about one of the above situations or had any similar thoughts on daily city challenges and came out with a solution for that (even if it vanished secs after the light lit)? Well, it’s time to look for that apparently non-sense or too ambitious thought and make it happen as you may have more people supporting you than you think..
Smart Open Lisboa is here for you. It was built to encourage those who want to work on solutions with real and concrete impact, as some tech giants – Cisco, PT, Lisbon city council or Turismo de Portugal – are backing up crazy ideas being developed in such an innovative accelerator and supporting those who are ready to upgrade Lisbon’s city life.
As mentioned on our website, there are many challenges needing a modern approach and smart solutions including Mobility, Citizen Engagement, Culture and Tourism or Sustainability. Next week (July 1-2) it’s time to turn these and others urban challenges into oppportunities during the SmartOpenLisboa Hackathon taking place at Fundação Portuguesa das Comunicações.
You’ll be provided with Cisco technologies to enable your product / service development such as Cisco Spark (for team to stay in sync), CMX (deliver personalized content to mobile devices and gather customer insights), Tropo (simple way to build phone and sms applications) and others.
Is it the case that you feel the above mentioned pains, don’t have any idea about how to fix it but would still like to work on something? Take this example of how to solve sustainability problems by reading this article on Smart Cities (one of the topics that we focus the most at SOL) published (in PT, sorry for that) by Joel Curado from our partner Cisco.[/fusion_text]
