Looking for new success products from the spheres of the Internet of things and smart home solutions, the Elisa Innovation Challenge competition has now reached the finals stage. The jury chose the three best entrants from both competition categories to continue development towards the announcement of the winners to be done at the Slush event.
The Elisa Innovation Challenge competition of 2016 is now in its end straight. The first product development phase, which began in mid-August and took six weeks, ended on September 30th, when the competition jury picked the three best teams from the IoT and Smart Home categories for the final round.
The teams that made it to the final of the IoT competition were the Finnish Emergence and Spectral Engines, and the Mexican MeOn. The Smart Home finalists are the Finnish Affectones and Lukoton and the Swedish Minut. More detailed descriptions of the competition products are presented below.
– The level of the competitors is really high this year as well. In the top three in the IoT category, there are two internationally unique technical achievements and one challenger that focuses on ease of use, and all of them have outstanding commercial potential. All three teams are already aiming for global markets to begin with, says with delight the Vice President responsible for Elisa’s IoT project, Markku Hollström.
– Smart home solutions will become more common in the next few years, at a rapid rate. One prerequisite of success is ease of use, through which the trust of the normal consumer is also gained. It’s exactly this factor that unites the finalists of our Smart Home category, because all of them are striving for making life easier. It’s really great to see how much can be achieved in just six weeks,” says Elisa’s Business Director, Matias Castrén.
Nearly a hundred competition entries were sent at the beginning for the Elisa Innovation Challenge 2016 competition, of which 19 were selected for the actual competition. The competition will culminate on 1.12.2016 at the Slush event at the Expo and Convention Centre of Helsinki, where the finalists will present their products to the broader public.
Elisa is the main co-operative partner of Slush for the third consecutive year. Participating in Slush is a natural way for Elisa to strengthen its co-operation with start-up companies.
– The change of Elisa into a recognised international provider of digital services is continuing. With start-ups, we’ve already brought numerous innovations into the market for years, furthering the start-ups on the way to international success. Slush is an excellent channel for us to find new partners that we can help to revolutionise the world, says Kimmo Pentikäinen, the Vice President of Business Development, in charge of Elisa Startup Partnerships.
Emergence
Emergence is developing a positioning service that’s self-sufficient in energy. At the heart of this, there’s a positioning device that operates for as much as more than ten years without servicing on solar energy and a battery. The technology that is to do with energy collection is patented by Emergence.
MeOn
The Mexican MeOn is in the competition with a vibration sensor that’s at the prototype stage and seeks to predict the breakdown of industrial machines from the increase in vibration levels. MeOn distinguishes itself from its industrial competitors in that the product learns the normal operation of the machine automatically and offers an easy alert and management user interface through a cloud service, directly for the end customer.
Spectral Engines
Spectral Engines has developed and patented a material sensor based on a new kind of optical measurement, with which different kinds of materials, substances and substance contents can be identified. Within the scope of the competition, the company is expanding its operations into the milk industry by offering and easy way to measure the composition of milk, such as fat content.
Affectones
Team Affectones is developing a virtual butler that is now known under the operating title of Alfred. The product in question is a self-learning cloud service that brings together information from the diaries of all the family members and the smart devices of the home and makes it easier to organise joint errands by making smart suggestions on how to take care of them.
Lukoton
Lukoton has developed a smart lock adapter, with which the traditional locks of domestic doors can be adapted to be controlled with a smartphone. The company has so far concentrated on housing associations, but through the competition of Elisa, a consumer version of the product is also being developed for ordinary homes.
Minut
Point, developed by the Swedish Minut company, is a new kind of home security system based on artificial intelligence. The device, which is the size of a fire alarm, is equipped with a number of sensors which provide data that enables the software to identify irregularities and issue alerts about them to the smartphone of the user.
More information about the competition:
https://elisa.fi/innovation-challenge/
Further information:
The Elisa IoT Innovation Challenge competition:
Ville Landtman, tel. 050 5608821, [email protected]
The Elisa Smart Home Innovation Challenge competition:
Heini Lehtonen, tel. 050 1683, [email protected]
Elisa IoT is an open development and service platform that makes the development of various IoT services and networked devices agile, fast and secure. Codeless tools, open interfaces and real-time visualisation allow ideas to be turned into products and business much faster than traditional IT projects. The Elisa IoT ecosystem is a network of expert companies that offers expertise in areas from application development and hardware solutions to intelligent analytics. www.elisa.com/iot
Elisa is a telecommunications, ICT and online service company serving 2.3 million consumer, corporate and public administration organisation customers. Elisa provides environmentally sustainable services for communication and entertainment, and tools for improving operating methods and productivity of organisations. In Finland Elisa is the market leader in mobile subscriptions. Cooperation with Vodafone and Telenor enables globally competitive services. Elisa is listed on Nasdaq Helsinki Large Cap with approximately 200 000 shareholders. Elisa's revenue in 2015 was 1.57 billion euros and it employed 4,100 people. www.elisa.com
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