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Terça-Feira, 3 de Maio de 2016

Portuguese start-up Horizontal Cities honoured by the European Space Agency

The Portuguese start-up Horizontal Cities, which is supported by Vodafone Power Lab, has won the Space Business Idea Challenge, an initiative of the Advanced Research in Telecommunications Systems (ARTES) programme of the European Space Agency (ESA). The award was presented on Friday 29 April at a ceremony in Brussels. Future collaborations between the start-up and ESA have already been agreed.

Winner of Vodafone BIG smart cities 2015 – the entrepreneurship and innovation competition promoted by Vodafone Power Lab, which this year takes place in partnership with Ericsson and is open for online applications until Wednesday 4 May – Horizontal Cities is an app designed for cyclists, which calculates routes to avoid a city’s inclines to create a flat route.

Incubated at Vodafone Power Lab’s Lisbon centre, the idea has evolved from the city of Lisbon to a more global approach, at the same time changing its name from Lisboa Horizontal to Horizontal Cities.The Portuguese start-up currently already has 17% of the world mapped using topographic modes of cities.

Its market launch (expected soon) is therefore planned to take place in more than one European city, enabling anyone to replace traditional transport by bicycle in their everyday travels or leisure.

This was also, incidentally, the objective of ARTES: to promote technological ideas and applications to improve the lives of European citizens and society in general.Out of the tens of projects that entered the competition, Horizontal Cities caught the jury’s eye precisely because it matched ESA’s desired innovation criteria.