The solution

Botcar is a Digital Platform for mobility & things. Instead of measuring only the actions people and things take in your location-aware application, it helps you to analyze and trigger ITTT (If This Then That) events based on geo-location. A mobility event can be anything – a car accident, someone driving near a petrol station, a parking spot that becomes vacant in a given parking lot.

There are only two things you really need to know about Botcar: mobility events and automations.

The USP of your product or service

Botcar allows you to transform old cars into connected cars for less than €100 of investment. Unlike other alternatives, BotCar works as a platform that provides access to connected car services and discounts on the fly, from services related to petrol to maintenance and car insurance.

Main achievements and success factors

The company was awarded the Best IoT Solution under the FIWARE Excellence Challenge

We have developed a combination of our own device and a mobile app that transforms old cars into connected cars for less than €100 of investment.

We have already organized our first eco-driving contest in real life conditions, a 5 full day competition with 200 vehicles competing in three different challenges at the same time.

We have been selected as one of the Deloitte Digital Disruptors that is set to disrupt the insurance industry in the near future.

Support received by SOUL-FI/FIWARE and lessons learnt

Thanks to our participation in SOUL-FI/FIWARE we were invited to participate in the Deloitte Digital Disruptors Challenge, with SOUL-FI acting as our business card to get access to investors, prescribers and new customers.

The SOUL-FI methodology helped us a lot to test our solution in the market, get feedback and pivot our business approach and the business model.

The funding support received from SOUL-FI it was crucial for us to develop our MVP, with a combination of milestones, FIWARE technology, funding support and awareness-raising being the key ingredients for a recipe of successful acceleration support that helped push us to the next level.

The solution

Findster helps pet owners and parents assure they will never lose their loved ones again. There are two Findsters wirelessly connected to each other – one for you and another for your loved one.

From the Findster App on your smartphone you can track your loved one in real time, receive immediate alerts if he leaves or enters a predefined area giving the user the opportunity to react in a timely manner and share its location with authorized people like family and friends. Findster is the first of its kind – it is the first GPS tracker that allows real time monitoring, is free of contracts and free of monthly fees.

The USP of the product or service

Current tracking systems don’t allow real time monitoring (having notifications with 15 minutes of delay), require 1 to 2 years contracts and the payment of a monthly fee directly to Telcos. Findster is democratizing the access to location systems and allowing its inclusion in the everyday life of families. Our groundbreaking RF technology allows real time monitoring, is free of contracts and free of monthly fees, allowing our customers to save up to $1000 over 2 years. Plus, it can be used worldwide without country restrictions.

This unique value proposition is possible due to Findster’s proprietary communication technology that is independent from Telcos or its infrastructure. It was designed to provide peace of mind to parents and pet owners, assuring a higher degree of protection to their loved ones and acting preemptively in missing cases scenarios.

Findster includes a state-of-art GPS receiver which allows high-precision without compromising speed. On the top of the core feature – GPS location monitoring – Findster Kids and Findster Pets have additional features tailored for each one of them. Findster Kids has a panic button while Findster Pets includes an activity tracker that triggers smart alerts when you don’t walk you dog for 2 days in a row or if the activity levels of your dog were lower than usual.

Main achievements and success factors

Findster was able to generate revenue even before the company had been officially established. To validate the product/market fit they launched a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo achieving $130k in revenues with buyers from more than 50 countries that bought Findster 12 months in advance. These figures were obtained organically, without any investment in digital marketing.

Findster applied to and was subsequently selected for the European Space Agency Business Incubation Center (ESA-BIC) and they also got a grant, amongst other reasons thanks to the SOUL-FI label.

Currently they are looking for a seed investment and are engaging with their first users. In fact, they have started shipping their products to their first customers: people from 52 different countries who already bought Findster through their crowdfunding campaign.

In fact after they had a suitable prototype, they started a crowdfunding campaign on the Indiegogo platform to verify if parents and pet owners around the world were interested in this type of solution.

Their assumptions were validated. The campaign was a success, with over $130,000 raised and buyers from 52 different countries. This proved that parents and pet owners are in fact willing to pay $99 for a real-time GPS tracker which is completely free of monthly fees. It reinforced their confidence in the product and also gave them facts to back their statements when talking about their potential market reach with possible investors.

In the next stages the company will be able to get feedback from their first users and do a more complete evaluation, including what went smoothly and what could be improved in the future.

Findster is also Alumni of Hax – the most important Hardware accelerator in the world

Support received by SOUL-FI/FIWARE and lessons learnt

When they applied to Round B of the SOUL-FI accelerator project, they believed that it would help them to reach the market with a better solution, speeding up the development process of the product and saving time without sacrificing quality.

Their 6-month participation in the SOUL-FI program has definitely helped to confirm their expectations. By using FIWARE technologies they were able to speed up Findster’s development and are now finishing off their first products which are currently undergoing mass production. They have also added new staff to their team, whose valuable resources have contributed significantly to their success. In short, over this 6-month period the company managed to make their product more reliable and to reduce its time to market.

The technological world is only getting more and more competitive, with new businesses starting every day. Considering this, the first thing that any aspiring business should do (assuming they already have an innovative idea) is to make sure that the product or service it provides will solve an existing problem for a wide range of people who are willing to pay for their solution.

The solution

inReception is a management solution tailored for non-hotel accommodation such as B&B, farm stays, holiday flats and apartments. It is a mobile solution to improve and simplify the management of small properties.

Our vision is to enable every house, every apartments or villa to become a vacation spot, providing the owner with a simple and complete solution to meet the daily requirements of non-hotel accommodation. Everyone could become a host, with the right tools.

After registering on the platform, users can add their property and start managing their business. They can control all the operations from a single app, manage reservations using a single calendar, get more viewers using the channel manager, push their room inventory on hundreds of sales channels with a click (Booking.com, Expedia, AirBnb, etc.). They can also integrate our booking engine into their own website or Facebook page to get direct reservations, track relationships and keep in touch with their customers.

In a few words, we make life easier for small accommodation owners.

The USP of your product or service

More and more tourists are choosing non-conventional accommodation (single properties, B&B, farm stays).  In 2014, more than 25 million Europeans chose non-hotel accommodation for their travel. While travelers’ needs are fully covered by a wide range of services, from TripAdvisor to Airbnb, no one is addressing the needs of small accommodation owners. Existing solutions, which are made with hotel chains in mind, are too complex, not integrated and not affordable for small properties.

Small accommodation units usually do not have a proper reception. The owner carries out all the management tasks her/himself, such as reservations, payments, list of arrivals and departures.

inReception is a simple and complete solution which takes care of the daily activities of property owners, from bookings and payments to reports and finance, from wherever they are. It is an all-in-one solution with management, booking and promotion features.

Owners can access all the functionalities they need in just one place, on the move, improving management and increasing revenues.

Tourists can easily find new accommodation not present on other sales channels with best price guaranteed, real-time information on availability and no overbooking risks.

Main achievements and success factors

We were selected by INVITALIA Smart & Start and we are actually accelerated in H-FARM, one of the most important Italian venture incubators.

Support received by SOUL-FI/FIWARE and lessons learnt

SOUL-FI provided us with support during all the development phases as well as great networking opportunities. SOUL-FI events in particular have been excellent occasions for discovering private and public funding opportunities and meeting European investors, municipalities and startups.

Thanks to SOUL-FI, we were selected as part of the FIWARE VIP program among virtually 1000 startups from different sectors all around Europe. We gained access to the FIWARE VIP Bootcamp event in Milan, a unique opportunity to improve our business reach and a chance to present our product to all the main European VCs and Business Angels.

We started working with FIWARE on other projects, discovering the potential of the enablers and the flexibility of the infrastructure. The widespread adoption of the generic enablers allowed us to accelerate the time to market, remaining focused on the development of the core features.  With its rich community and fast-growing ecosystem, FIWARE provides good support during the development phase and delivers products and services that can facilitate the exchange of data with other smart tourism applications.

The solution

Magenta provides software design and development services to private and public organizations in the areas of 1) processing and analysis of digital media such as image and video stream, 2) enterprise web-based management applications, and 3) mobile apps. It is also active in R&D, successfully conducting projects which are co-funded at regional and EU level. As part of these projects, the company has matured expertise in the “traffic analytics” domain on which the FLOUD idea is based.

FLOUD is a cloud service able to automatically extract meaningful traffic statistics from a video stream, such as the number and type of vehicles passing by. The platform receives incoming video streams, either taken from a recorded file or from a camera live stream, and allows the user to configure one or more measuring locations, typically placed along the road lanes. The system can detect and count vehicles moving on motor lanes (such as cars, trucks, buses, motorbikes), as well as bicycles and pedestrians.

The USP of the product or service

The Unique Selling Proposition of the traffic analytics they provide for smarter cities is that it requires nearly-zero physical and technical infrastructure.

In fact people can acquire analytics on vehicle traffic and contexts just by using an app or a dedicated device, while stakeholders can access the data directly via the platform. Another strong feature of FLOUD is the possibility to access aggregated data and analytics on complex features like pedestrian and vehicle flow inside a city.

Main achievements and success factors

During their Round B project, Magenta started some pilot actions with key stakeholders in the smart city and retail sector. With regard to smart cities, they have an ongoing pilot in the metropolitan area of Florence, where currently some 30 sensors have been deployed. Other potential partners (industrial and institutional) have been contacted and pilots are either planned or just started. With regard to the retail sector, the company is in the process of activating a pilot with one of the major commercial centers in Milan.

Recently, thanks to the robustness of their business proposition, Magenta was awarded a Phase 1 project under the SME Instrument call H2020-SMEINST-1-2015.

Support received by SOUL-FI/FIWARE and lessons learnt

Thanks to SOUL-FI funding, Magenta has been able to build some potential partnerships, in particular with start-ups working in the field of urban logistics and transportation in general. They were selected among the 50 best FIWARE companies in Europe during the last ECFI event which helped to trigger some interest from investors.

Thanks to FIWARE GEs they were able to build an advanced prototype of the complete solution, which is now available for testing by potential customers and stakeholders.

For Magenta the main ingredient for making a successful Future Internet business is the ability to provide highly contextual information to users, based on current time, location, and user’s activity.

The solution

TaxiMotions is an aggregator platform for taxi and other types of urban mobility services.

It comprises web and mobile apps, targeting not just the end users (passengers and individual drivers), but also 3^rd party demand generators (e.g. organizations and multimodal apps) and suppliers (e.g. fleet managers and cooperatives).

The Unique Selling Proposition of your product or service

TaxiMotions is the first app connecting both individual users and 3^rd party stakeholders of urban mobility services.

In addition to the TaxiMotions branded app, which targets individual passengers and drivers, we provide white label apps specially designed for 3^rd party suppliers.

We also have an open API allowing 3^rd party demand generators, like multimodal apps or e-concierge apps, to keep focused on what matters for their business.

Our corporate service is allows companies to keep a check on all requested services, whether their employees are reimbursed for the services they use or not. We also provide seamless electronic payments and flexible invoicing reporting.

Several powerful web-based and user–friendly management tools are available for all users.

Main achievements and success factors

We have built a flexible yet reliable product and developed a number of important partnerships and a strong community of users, both on the demand and supply side. After their launch in Lisbon and Luxembourg, we are now ready to scale up our services.

In the meanwhile, TaxiMotions has already received some major awards/recognition, particularly in the smart cities’ domain:

• Winner of Lisbon Big Apps, promoted by Vodafone, Lisbon Municipality and iMatch.
• Winner of Intelligent Cities Prize, promoted by Visão, Siemens and Inteli.

More recently, it was selected to participate in Round A and B of the FIWARE/SOUL-FI Program.

Support received from SOUL-FI/FIWARE and lessons learnt

The experience we gained from the SOUL-FI Round A and B funding programs made an important contribution to our success.

FIWARE provided both flexible and powerful tools for the TaxiMotions platform to help leverage its value proposition.

Both SOUL-FI and FIWARE programs gave us easier access to mentoring, coaching and very valuable networking events and webinars. The continuous support of our tutors and the entire IPN team allowed us to accelerate our go-to-market process.

More importantly, we had the opportunity to strengthen our interaction with multiple stakeholders and our community of users.

The solution

Ususty makes waste smart and sexy. The Hungarian startup company develops IoT sensor-based waste management solutions to incentivize urban residents to recycle their waste. The sensors work with all waste types: bio-waste, municipal solid waste and e-waste. In particular within SOUL-FI, the company has focused its efforts on proving the concept of the following solutions:

• Ewa: The e-waste eradicator: Ewa is a gamified smart-collector unit family, which works like a slot machine game. But instead of coins it functions with old phones and instead of money users win a range of discounts and rewards. The product was featured on a number of events and festivals, proving that incentivized recycling can increase waste collection figures from 10 to 100-fold.
• Green-beetle: The intelligent and gamified waste management solution. Green-beetle is an easy to install and cheap sensor system that monitors bin fill levels in real time, allowing a reduction of waste logistic costs of around 30-50%. The sensors also collect user-interaction data, which enables the gamification of the recycling process. Recycling competitions can be realized between cities, communes and individuals, incentivized by local governments and sponsoring companies

The USP of the product or service

The key selling points for the Ewa units are:

• Automated buy-back program
• Easily modified reward options
• Brand differentiator (advantage for first movers, excellent new market segmentation – Y generation, conscious, environmentally aware, etc.)
• Hardcore corporate responsibility project (real environmental impact, CSR communication, sustainability report, compliance)
• Activation platform for different product promotions (new promotions, seasonal promotions, try & buy)
• Closed free-wifi for clients who return their phone

While the key selling points of the Green-beetle sensors are:

• Low cost and easy to install infrastructure which can be fixed to every type of out or indoor bin
• Easily modified reward options (individual and community rewards)
• Success fee-based license sales (significantly lower risk, and quicker ROI)
• Campaign and communication value for municipalities
• Open-source DIY sensor design to enable rapid scaling
• Real-time buyback of every waste type through blockchain based transactional platform (Etherium)

Main achievements and success factors

Ususty won the start-up Chile acceleration programme and was selected to be part of the VIP programme managed by FI-BUSINESS. Ususty was accepted by the SEED accelerator in Brazil, and qualified to take part in the Singularity Global Impact Competition 2016 finals. Ususty was also awarded a place in PRAE, a program focusing on smart city solutions improving the quality of urban life in the region of Valparaiso.

While Ewa is being used as a case study for incentivized recycling, Green-beetle is being commercialized rapidly. In Chile, Ususty is funding a joint company with one of the biggest recycling companies – Recycla Chile to offer value added services to their B2B clients, with sensors and competitions inside companies. In Hungary, Ususty is partnering with RecoBin which provides recycling solutions for companies and is looking into the area of bio-waste, on how to increase the efficiency of Hungarian bio-waste reactors, through the automated purchase and incentivized collection of residential bio-waste.

Support received by SOUL-FI/FIWARE and lessons learnt

Many lessons were learnt from working together with the SOUL-FI team. We might have incredible ideas, and might know where we are going, but to identify the next steps requires rational thinking, analysis and consultation. We received a lot of honest criticism, structural feedback and practical tips from the SOUL-FI tutoring team, which enabled us to strip down our vision and identify the development steps that will take us to the next level. A solid business plan might be a hassle to write, but in reality it makes you think through all of the aspects that a startup will have to work out – and it’s much easier to think of these in advance, rather than having to think of them just before making a decision in front of an investor or a client.

The solution

We have created a new sales channel between the online and offline world, reducing the barriers between consumers and retailers. It also creates a new communication channel between the population and city authorities and small businesses.

VENTO.TV creates a personal and instantaneous relationship between a website visitor and the business/organization behind it through video streaming, video conference and chat in real time, while allowing the visitor to stay anonymous at all moments if preferred. The visitor does not need to download or install anything. It offers a great opportunity to guide customers as the shopping experience offered to consumers has become a key element of sales strategy.

The solution is available for smartphone, tablet or pc and allows the retailer to show his/her products in real time from anywhere.

The USP of your product or service

We provide businesses with a personal and unique URL that enables, with just one click, a direct live access to their customers and business. They can include this URL in a web page button, floating widget, email, newsletter, or any other online communication channel they may have.

We provide retailers, whether they are in their business or on the move, the possibility to attend to live customers who may also be from the online world.

We provide web visitors with the opportunity to have a live video call with the business behind a web page while remaining completely anonymous.

We provide multiple visitors of a web site the possibility to see a live streaming image of the business when visiting a website. We allow the visitor to create this live video image from their smartphone or webcam.

We make it possible to create a multi-camera video streaming for customers and to record the videoconference if needed.

We offer a Freemium model that enables potential customers to test the application without any infrastructure investment. We also provide a self-management web interface so that customers can manage their account

Main achievements and success factors

Thanks to SOUL-FI/ADE support and mentoring we now have some 120 business using the VENTO.TV platform and multiple partners in key markets.

The SOUL-FI program has helped us to increase the functionality of our product and offer functionality that competitors are not providing. We finished product development in February 2016 and then began signing partner agreements and direct sales contacts.

In terms of Smart Cities, we are working in Valladolid to create a new communication channel between the population and the city’s businesses. We have signed an agreement with Valladolid Enterprise Association (CVE) to promote VENTO.TV to their members.

As far as the automotive industry is concerned, we have reached an agreement with Faconauto, the Spanish Car Dealer association. They are promoting VENTO.TV because they think that it helps car dealers business to keep competitive; since then a number of car dealers have started using VENTO.TV

We have successfully integrated VENTO.TV in Classified Search Portals such as Publicamianuncio.es. Also AIMGROUP, one of the world’s largest classified search consultants, published an article about us after testing the product in their 2016 Classified Intelligence Report.

We have several hotels using our tool in the tourism sector, for example, the Ritz Carlton Santiago de Chile which uses a VENTO.TV  URL to provide VIP support to those clients that contact them to request more information about the hotel.

Our customers include multiple small businesses working in very different markets, from jewelers to a language academic, physiotherapy clinics and more.

Support received by SOUL-FI/FIWARE and lessons learnt

We have received great support, both from SOUL-FI and ADE, to improve our product and our company. The ADE team reviewed our project and detected the weak points on which we needed mentoring and training. They then provided us with courses on those topics for which we required more help, e.g. on marketing and sales.

We benefited from the services of a FIWARE tutor who helped us review all the possibilities of the FIWARE technology.

The SOUL-FI team created several networking and training events with cities and investors that helped us initiate contacts with different stakeholders. The SOUL-FI team also provided us with ongoing and updated information about other FIWARE events, investor and accelerator opportunities, summits, etc.

The support from SOUL-FI/ADE was really useful for us to move one step up.