At a time where Lisbon is perceived as one of the must visit European capitals, Vodafone has now launched Vodafone Lisbon Big Apps, to find out and reward the best future smartphone applications that will focus on improving citizens, tourists and workers’ lives.
Initially, the 20 best ideas will be selected for a development period, in which the projects will receive mentoring and implementation support through a Business Development and Acceleration Programme. This will be mainly composed of on-site training, concept enhancement and industry knowledge sharing. Finally, a specialized jury will evaluate and give feedback on each project, electing the three best projects. In addition to the City-Apps category, another one will be created, dedicated to Tourism and supported by CitySDK (a European project between several cities such as Helsinki, Amsterdam and Rome). This will grant participants the possibility to immediately put their applications up and running in these European cities as well.
The three winners will be rewarded with a total of 30 thousand euros that will be allocated between the two winners of the following two categories: “Best City-App” and “Best Tourism App”. In addition, the all-around winner will be entitled to a full year under the Start-up Incubator Programme, at Vodafone Lisbon Labs. Furthermore, after launching their apps on the marketplace, all winners will also have the rights to participate in training and mentoring sessions lectured by several commercial and technical specialists; a “tailored” marketing and communication plan; free access to cloud services and to Vodafone communication channels.
The application period is now open at http://lisboa.bigapps.co/ and will close on the 18th of May. The three winners will be announced on the 14th of July, at Vodafone Portugal’s headquarters.
This initiative results from Vodafone Portugal and Lisbon Municipality desire to encourage and boost innovation through entrepreneurship incentives. In particular, Vodafone Portugal has been involved in stimulating the creation of sustainable businesses related to mobile data, through similar actions. Amongst these, Vodafone Lisbon Labs is of particular importance, since it helps Portuguese start-up companies gaining national and international opportunities, subsequently contributing for growth of the Portuguese ICT industry.
