Startups across Europe are already creating surprising and innovative solutions with data, including these companies who excelled on the Open Data Incubator for Europe programme.
With air pollution causing one in every seventh death worldwide and 90 per cent of the urban population breathing polluted air every day, a vast proportion of the world’s population is at risk of shortening their lifespan through health problems like asthma and heart diseases, Poor air quality especially affects children.
Green City Solution developed the CityTree as part of ODINE, a vertical wall of moss that helps purify polluted air. It uses open data to inform where to install the wall and collects data from sensors to measure impact. The wall is a unique patented combination of Bio- and IoT-technology which utilizes special moss species to filter pollutants such as particulate matter. Unlike other filter systems it converts those pollutants into biomass. The CityTree has solar PV-panels and a sensor controlled irrigation system to maximise efficiency, self sustainability and data collection. It can filter as much pollution as 275 urban trees.
Bike Citizens provides smart services including a route planner and a bike-sharing feature to make urban cycling easier. The team from Austria received €99,000 in funding from ODINE to develop its cycling app and other tools, developing them for cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants.
The team’s tools are now available in over 400 cities worldwide including: a tool for urban cycling; a Bike Citizens map and route planner, the #5minsbybike function, as well as many other tools.
Plume’s mission is to make the air we breathe more transparent by raising awareness of the largest environmental hazard globally: pollution. The team gathers information about air pollution in 200 cities all over the world, and makes the information available online.
Last year, the team trained a flock of ten racing pigeons to take wing over London, wearing tiny sensors designed to Tweet real-time information about local levels of air pollution. The campaign was used to publicise a Crowdfunder project for Plume Labs: to test a new wearable air quality sensor product, which it went on to successfully fund.
imin is making data on local sports and physical activities searchable. Using a real-time aggregator of physical activity opportunities (bookable facilities and classes) and suite of APIs allows app developers to easily provide search, book and pay functionality for their end-users, supporting a revolutionary new user experience for the sector, boosting user appeal for their app, and getting more people more active.
Image: Open Data Institute, (CC BY-SA 2.0)