EU kick-starts €400,000 apps competition for smarter cities and businesses

29 Nov 2013

The EU is offering €400,000 in prizes for new applications that can be used to build smarter cities and smarter businesses.

Judged by specialised engineers from the EU-funded FI-WARE Consortium, the only condition of the competition is that app entries are built upon building blocks deployed in the EU’s project to build the core platform of tomorrow’s internet.

Some 50 of these existing building blocks are in place and are freely available through the FI-WARE Open Innovation Lab for developers to experiment.

These building blocks provide generic functions that can be used by a range of different applications from sectors like cloud hosting, big data analysis, identity management or the internet of things.

Competition entrants will compete for a total of €400,000 in prize money divided between the two categories, Smart Cities apps and Smart Business apps.

In the first round, there will be up to 20 prizes of €2,800 each, and the opportunity to attend Campus Party 2014 in Sao Paulo, Brazil, to in turn compete for a first prize of €75,000, a second prize of €40,000 and a third prize of €20,000.

The smart city apps will ideally be tools that will help run public services more efficiently or help cities provide innovative services to citizens.

And the smart business apps will ideally help businesses – ideally smaller ones – to run and manage themselves better.

Developers and entrepreneurs can enter the FI-WARE contest online. Entries close on 20 December.

John Kennedy is a journalist who served as editor of Silicon Republic for 17 years

editorial@siliconrepublic.com