SMART CITY EXPO WORLD CONGRESS 2018
Topics featured
Smart City Expo World Congress continues promoting debate and creating synergies with the issues that matter: with 8 Topics, the event will provide the platform for experts and market players to share and exchange knowledge and solutions, and look in-depth at the great challenges that modern cities face.+
Governance
What does good governance really mean today?
City-to-city cooperation, commons, cooperation platforms, data maturity, e-democracy, e-government, engagement, multilevel governance, open data, open government, open innovation, policy framework, public-public cooperation, public services, service integration, transparency.
Mobility
Is urban mobility meant to be driverless?
Connected & self-driving vehicle, cycling, electric vehicle, freight, logistics optimization, integration platforms, intelligent transport systems, mobility as a service, multimodal transport system, non-motorized mobility, parking, pedestrian strategy, policy framework, public transport, real-time data, shared transportation, sustainable urban mobility, traffic management, transport hubs, transportation networks, walkable.
Safe Cities
Making our cities safer
Cybersecurity, data protection and privacy, disaster recovery, emergencies, legislation, public safety, regulation, resilience, risk management, security technologies, surveillance.
Economy
Why new urban economies make sense for a sustainable development
Accountability, new business model, cooperation model, entrepreneurship, development, financing, investing, public procurement, produsage, public-private-people partnership, public value, shared value, sharing economy, social economy, startup, user value.
Sustainability
Cities leading the global fight against climate change
Air pollution, alternative resources, climate change, energy, geoinformation, green areas, green building, intelligent building systems, greenhouse gas emissions, housing, lighting, low carbon, open space, population growth, public space, regeneration, regional development, renewable energy, rural development, rural grids, smart grids, strategic planning, urban design, urban planning and development, urban farming, urban furniture, utilities, water management, waste management, zero carbon.
Circular Economy
Taking transformative actions to a circular future
Blue economy, business model, closed loop, design for circularity, eco-design, food, green industry, industrial symbiosis, job creation, low carbon, logistic for circularity, material flow, packaging, plastics, product as service, productive cities, re-cycling, regenerative system, refurbish, remanufacturing, resource efficiency, re-use, repair, supply chain, textile, urban mining, zero waste.
Society
Empowering people to tackle social challenges
Ageing population, cocity, co-creation, co-production, culture, digital divide, education, e-health, e-learning, empowerment, equity, gender, health, inclusive, inequality, knowledge, living labs, participation, population growth, quality of life, right to the city, social innovation, social services, wellbeing.
Data & Technology
How disruptive technologies are re-shaping cities
Advanced analytics, big data, block chain, business intelligence, cloud, city platform, computer networking, data center, data management, data visualization, digital modelling, disruptive technologies, distributed architectures, drones, geoinformation, hardware development, information technology, infrastructure development, internet, interoperability, network infrastructure, robotics, sensors & connectivity, service integration, software development, telecommunications.
Why exhibit?
SCEWC gathers together the highest level of global stakeholders to exchange experiences, ideas, form valuable connections and make international business deals.
Discover the infinite potential to exhibit at the worldwide leading event for smart cities
Promote your business at the referential global event
Position your company in a global marketplace to grow and thrive in the support of the development of our cities.
Reach a global audience at the international meeting point for cities
Showcase your projects and solutions to prospective clients from a total +18,700 professional attendees and develop business with countries, cities, universities, investors, startups, among others.
Network and forge new partnerships
Engage with key decision makers (c-level management, presidents, public servers, etc.) coming from multiple industries related to smart cities, from both the private and public sectors. Benefit from our networking tools to create new collaboration opportunities.
Acquire expert knowledge from global experts
At the 1st class summit for smart cities over 420 acclaimed speakers discuss the crucial debates as well as enabling innovative ideas on Governance, Economy, Mobility, Technology, Sustainability, Safe Cities, Circular Economy and Society. Check out here who presented in 2017.
Engage with the issues at Side Events and Activities
Take advantage of the hugely popular Activities like the Brokerage Event (a matchmaking activity to generate networking opportunities), the Job Marketplace or dedicated Side Events that feature workshops and conferences with experts from specific sectors.
Enhance your brand awareness at the exceptionally rated expo
SCEWC has received incredibly positive feedback from worldwide exhibitors. Its level of satisfaction is high above the general trade show average and has increased year on year. Don’t miss this unique chance to present your brand to the whole ecosystem of smart city players and specialized media.
4YNF BARCELONA 2018
Connecting Startups
4YFN is the startup business platform of Mobile World Capital Barcelona that enables startups, investors, corporations and public institutions to discover, create and launch new ventures together.
4YFN offers unique connecting initiatives, such as custom networking activities, technical abilities workshops, congresses, community outreach and open innovation programmes.
We believe that the startup culture is the driving force for change in the economic and social fabric and, of course, Barcelona being a global tech hub is the ideal location for such creation and nurture.
Startups
Investors
Corporations
Visual commerce platform Photoslurp receives €750K in investment
Barcelona, November 2017 – Photoslurp, the leading visual commerce platform in Europe, just received an investment of €750.000. Inveready Technology Investment Group, a leading VC in Spain, led the Photoslurp investment with participation from Bankinter VC (through the Entrepreneurship Programme of Bankinter’s Innovation Foundation), Caixa Capital Risc and ICF. This is Photoslurp’s first investment, since the company was co-founded in 2014 by Ben Heinkel and Eulogi Bordas, having been completely bootstrapped to this point.
>From the beginning, Photoslurp has been enabling brands to engage with their customers while increasing their conversion rates by incorporating customers photos and videos in their websites as shoppable social proof. Growing rapidly, Photoslurp is now the market leader in Europe working with over 150 brands in 20 countries. Links of London, Folli Follie, Tally Weijl, Cluse Watches, Adolfo Domínguez and Lindblad Expeditions are some of their flagship clients.
Visual Commerce Platform
Photoslurp’s visual commerce platform allows brands to leverage User Generated Content (UGC) created by their fans and customers. The platform scans social media for photos and videos of customers with a brand’s’ products and integrates them into the brand’s online store. By directly linking this media to products, they become shoppable and lead to increased conversion rates.
As a result, brands benefit from the use of this media by creating an engaging community feeling on their website, while enriching product pages with inspiring real-life social content and boosting their e-commerce conversion rate in the process.
Photoslurp’s extensive analytics suite allows brands to measure real-time the impact of UGC in their online stores as well as provides key ROI metrics. The best performing photos or videos are identified and can then be pushed to Facebook and Instagram to create high performing advertisements. In addition, the suite helps to identify and monitor brand evangelists across social media networks, enabling brands to further engage with them.
Scaling up the business
The investment enables Photoslurp to fully grab the momentum of visual commerce, by scaling up European growth and continuously increasing the added value for their clients by enhancing their technology. “Visual commerce is becoming more important by the day”, says Eulogi Bordas, CEO of Photoslurp.”With the diminishing results of online advertising, UGC is extremely important for both building a community and engaging with your audience, reinforcing consumer trust, driving traffic and increasing your ecommerce conversion rate. Brands embracing photos and videos of customers have experienced significant ROI increases and we foresee that – in addition to fashion, beauty and travel brands – UGC will become indispensable for many brands from other industries as well.”
“The growth that Photoslurp managed to obtain without funding, the technical level of the visual commerce platform combined with its strong leadership team more than validates the investment”, explains Roger Piqué, Founding Partner of Inveready Technology Group. “We believe the importance of brand engagement and UGC will continue to surge, making it a key component in digital marketing campaigns. Therefore we are excited to be a partner in the scaling of Photoslurp as a leading company of the future.
Here’s Barcelona’s cunning plan to be new heart for digital health, biotech
By Anna Solana
Given its tech skills, concentration of universities and hospitals, and surge in funding, Barcelona has factors in common with Boston’s biotech cluster.
With more than €55m ($61m) invested in Catalan startups in the biotech sector over the first half of 2016, commentators are debating whether the new surge of funding is a blip or a trend.
“As a scientist, I deal with hypotheses, and one hypothesis circulating right now is that Barcelona is the next big thing. The place to be,” says Jordi Naval, the managing director of the Fundació Bosch i Gimpera.
As someone running the tech-transfer and innovation office of the University of Barcelona, he is convinced that the Catalan capital could be a new Boston, because it has that same combination of universities, companies, and human resources.
To manage the city’s infrastructure centrally, Barcelona’s council and supercomputing center, with Cisco and other technology partners, have just completed an innovative proof-of-concept platform.
“If you’re an investor in life sciences, and this applies to other fields, and think of investing in biotech projects, you know that US projects are well-valued but expensive. Yet, in Barcelona, you’ve got great science and fewer competitors. So, in a certain way, your money is better invested and can have a better return,” he tells ZDNet.
Recently, at the BizBarcelona congress, Naval, who is a cofounder of several startups in the biotech field, encouraged entrepreneurs to enter the digital-health ecosystem by emphasizing that the scientific publications ratio per researcher in Catalonia stands at 0.62, double the EU average of 0.30 in 2015.
“It’s assumed that if you’re good at producing scientific publications, much of this science has to be transferable,” he says.
The Biocat Report, published recently by the body tasked with promoting the Catalan healthcare and life-sciences sector, suggests he’s right. As of September 2015, the region of Catalonia had 499 tech companies in the biotech, medical-technology, and digital-health fields.
Once pharmaceutical corporations, professional services, consultancy firms, and research bodies are added in, that number rises to 734, some 222 more companies than those recorded in the 2013 Biocat Report. In terms of investment, between 2013 and 2015 bio-science firms in the Catalan region attracted more than €100m ($111m).
Biocat CEO Albert Barberà underlines that “all of these assets make the region a highly-competitive, innovative ecosystem that has gained importance compared with other leading European clusters, most of which it has collaboration agreements with”.
Still, there are challenges to be overcome. Public and private R&D investment in the sector dropped nearly 11 percent between 2009 and 2014. Plus, “the use of big data for predictive analytics will transform the services provided, making them more focused on preventing than curing”, Barberà says, and the sector has to be prepared for that.
“If we use data properly, we’ll be able to transform medicine as a science and healthcare, both as an industry by introducing new stakeholders in technology, and as a service by moving to personalized medicine,” he adds.
Alfons Nonell-Canals, CEO of Mind the Byte, a bioinformatics company specializing in computational drug discovery using a pay-per-use software-as-a-service platform, also sees a move to more personalized services.
His firm’s platform, developed with open-source software, enables researchers to predict biological activity and understand why compounds work or how they bond with proteins, thus cutting the cost and time in the various phases of drug development.
The company is located at the Barcelona Science Park and Copenhagen Bio Science Park. “We chose Copenhagen to easily expand to Scandinavia and the north of Europe and because it is in the heart of the Danish-Swedish life science cluster Medicon Valley,” Nonell-Canals says.
But he says Barcelona has huge academic potential, which creates an attractive environment for biotech companies.
“We still have few success stories. I would cite ORYZON. We need more investment, but the sector is growing and attracting more money. In addition, institutions, especially at the level of the Generalitat [Catalan government], are actively supporting its development,” he adds.
Ana Maiques, CEO of Neuroelectrics, a company developing technologies to monitor and stimulate the brain to help patients in need, argues that on top of Barcelona’s good universities, there is an entrepreneurial spirit, an excellent healthcare system, and a strong representation by the Spanish pharma and biotech industry.
“From a startup perspective, it gives us access to excellent hospitals to run clinical trials and, as a member of CataloniaBio association, a lot of industry peers from which to learn from,” she says.
Yet, for the moment, Maiques still lives in Boston.
Retrieved from ZDNet