FIWARE

The European Data Incubator (EDI) is a project co-financed by the European Union that seeks to support sustainable business incubation around analytics and Big Data. The consortium is made up of managers from several acceleration initiatives within the FIWARE Accelerate program, incubators of companies such as Deusto Entrepreneurship Center and etventure Seed Lab, as well as the network of emerging companies F6S.

To locate the candidate companies for the program, EDI has launched a call where SMEs and entrepreneurs will have to solve different challenges using a series of proposed data sets. These challenges and data have been provided by several European partners such as Volkswagen Navarra, Agencia EFE, Jot Internet Media or RACC.

The process that must be carried out by companies that want to participate in this program is:

1. Pick up a challenge from the challenge catalogue. There are two options. The first one is to choose one of the challenges propesed by the different data providers. They have challenges from Smart Cities, Energy & Environment, Internet & Media, Industry 4.0 and Retail sectors. The second options is to participate in the cross-sector challenge, where the only requirement is that you mix data from different sectors from our catalogue.
2. Check the data catalogue. This catalogue provide free samples of the full datasets companieswill have access to if selected. Some examples of these datasets are: marketing online campaigns statistics, anonymised employee information or  transaction items.
3. Submit a solution proposal to the selected challenge. Deadline for submission is on 27th of June at 12:00 (noon) via F6S Platform.

The selected teams can get up to €100,000 equity-free funding. In addition, EDI will help European SMEs and start-ups with:

• An infrastructure of high computing and storage hosted in cloud, based on open technologies.
• Training in the most popular Big Data Analytics tools.
• Advice for the development of viable business ideas.
• A connection network with top Big Data startups from all over Europe participating in the program.

For more information, you can visit the call summary and the guidelines for applicants.

Last Wednesday the conference Open Data for European Entrepreneurs was held in Pamplona gathering the FIWARE community. The event was organized by FINODEX accelerator that provides support services to European ICT industry building technological solutions re-using open data and making use of the open platform FIREWARE.

The roadshow was divided into different panels focussing on two main areas: FIWARE technology, a simple set of APIs that ease the development of smart applications in multiple vertical sectors, and open data entrepreneurship.

Based on both thematic lines, the fist panel offered to the assistants the opportunity to know real stories of entrepreneurs who, using the potential of open data, have developed innovative solutions such as the start-ups belonging to FINODEX Project. In fact, the three finalists of this program attended the event to share their experience with the public. 

Linkovate, first finalist, has developed a search engine that helps manufacturing and R&D equipment in companies to find technologies and partners. The second prize went to Xpressomics, who has also created a seeker but, in this case, of genetic information aimed at pharmaceutical industry and medical researchers. Lastly, Geezar and its Fruitwatcher was also present with a device that monitors the conditions of fruit in trucks to guarantee it reaches its destinations in perfect conditions.

Later, it was accelerators’ turn, companies that provide financial support and advice to entrepreneurs on their way to success and, after this round table, the expert from FIREWARE Foundation, Juanjo Hierro gave a talk as well as the Executive Officer at CDTI who underlined the role of public sector in technological innovation.

Moreover, lastly the conference was attended by representatives of Iniciativa Aporta -public sector programme to promote the re-use of open data in Spain- who presented the global open data meeting: the International Open Data Conference, held in Madrid by early October.  A new opportunity to know how open data can become the raw material for new products and services as those developed within FINODEX Project.