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Quarta-Feira, 6 de Março de 2013

Vodafone, Lisbon City Council and iMatch launch apps competition with start-ups incubation programme

Vodafone Portugal, in partnership with iMatch and with the support of Lisbon City Council, today announced the launch of a competition aimed at the Portuguese developer community and start-ups. The initiative, called Lisbon BIG Apps, aims to find and reward the best smartphone applications for the city of Lisbon, with the goal of improving the lives of all those who live, work or holiday there.

This project combines an ideas competition with a project development and acceleration programme to transform these ideas into prototypes and viable businesses. In addition to prize money of €20,000 for each of the three best projects, the winning teams will qualify for a six-month incubation programme, various training and mentoring programmes in various commercial and technical areas, free use of cloud data housing services and a marketing plan for promoting their apps in the market via Vodafone Portugal’s communication channels. The winning teams will also have access to a huge range of data (about 130 data sets) provided by Lisbon City Council, including varied information about organisations, historic buildings and other Lisbon infrastructures.

The competition is now open at www.lisbonbigapps.com for the collection of ideas. At the end of the first stage, which runs until 8 April, the top 15 candidates will be selected for the development, training (Open Days) and refinement of concepts stage. The final concepts will be evaluated in person by a jury of experts at a conference on Big Data to be held on 24 June at Vodafone Portugal’s Head Office. The three best projects will then go on to the incubation phase at Tec Labs – Innovation Centres of ISCTE and Lisbon University Faculty of Sciences.

This initiative stems from the wish of Vodafone Portugal and Lisbon City Council to foster and accelerate innovation in Portugal by encouraging entrepreneurship. Vodafone Portugal in particular has sought to stimulate creativity in the Mobile Internet field through various initiatives of this kind under the ‘Vodafone App Factory’ label in which it has created opportunities for Portuguese start-ups to project themselves nationally and internationally, so contributing to the growth and internationalisation of the technological areas of the Portuguese economy.