Photo: FI-WARE
€800,000 in prizes offered for best city apps
11 December 2013
by Richard Forster
Eight days remain for developers to submit new app designs that assist cities in innovative services and improve city management. FI-WARE, the platform based on development standards promoted by the European Commission, will reward developers with prizes ranging from €5,000 to €75,000 for smart city apps and smart business and industry apps.
The competition will be promoted through Campus Party and its platform Campus Labs and will be run in two phases, with the first part closing in February 2014 and the second part to be held at the end of next year.
“The smart cities challenge has drawn most of the attention,” Paco Ragageles, co-founder of Campus Party told Cities Today. “There are more than 400 participants in total with 275 applying to the smart cities challenge alone. We are receiving very innovative ideas to build high-level applications that solve real problems of today’s cities and businesses.”
To date, interest has been received from Oviedo, Madrid (Spain), Bauru, São Paulo (Brazil), Medellin (Colombia), Tel-Aviv (Israel) and cities from Greece, Bulgaria, Germany, Ecuador and Romania.
After 20 December the best ideas will be preselected when the successful teams will make a prototype to be improved and developed during Campus Party Brazil in São Paulo at the end of January 2014.
Although cities haven’t directly entered the competition, Ragageles believes that city governments can contribute further by increasing the availability of access to data. Spanish cities like Santander, Malaga and Seville have already shared their data on FI-LAB with interest spreading.
“FI-WARE has a direct line of collaboration with city governments, encouraging them to share their Open Data on FI-LAB,” he added. “This way cities will see, in a very direct way, the amazing developments entrepreneurs and developers can do with the huge amount of data they have in storage. It is a huge opportunity for cities to see what innovative applications can do for them.”
After the competitions, €100 million euros will be available to fund small- and medium-sized enterprises that develop their projects on FI-WARE during 2014 and 2015.
