Great success of the IoT EPI Innovation Night Zagreb!

On Tuesday 21st of November, HUB385 the major coworking and IT community centre in Zagreb, hosted the “IoT-EPI Innovation Night“. The event was co-organized by the symbIoTe project members (University of Zagreb-FER and Vipnet), IoT-EPI, and the local IoT community.

The event attracted around 100 participants from local startups, companies and IoT-related initiatives, who have had the opportunity to meet IoT-EPI representatives and discuss opportunities for collaboration and growth of the IoT ecosystem in Europe.

The event started with a welcome note by Mr Ivan Skender, Vipnet’s Chief Transformation Officer, followed by a well-framed overview of the Croatian IoT community by Mr Gorjan Agacevic, coordinator of the local IoT meetup community. During this first session, all the attendees could learn more about various projects and products classified in relevant verticals, either emerging or already established solutions enhancing the Croatian IoT arena.

Then, Mr Tushar Raju introduced the IoT-EPI initiative and its positioning in the European IoT research and innovation area. The IoT-EPI facilitates impact creation actions for the seven EC-funded projects that are covering different aspects of the IoT research and development field. Meetup events like the “Innovation Nights” series  create awareness about the offerings generated by IoT projects to a wider audience, aiming to create an EU IoT community comprising various types of organizations (startups, SMEs, research institutes, universities). One of the important activities by IoT-EPI is also the promotion of the 11 Open Calls with a total funding of 5.5 million EUR which the seven projects are launching to enrich the uptake of their results and to attract 3rd parties to join existing consortia.

The meetup was  completed with the pitches of 3 out of 7 of the IoT-EPI projects:

  • Mrs Ivana Podnar-Žarko (UNIZG-FER, HR) and Mr Sergios Soursos (Intracom Telecom, GR) presented the symbIoTe project, its objectives and challenges and how symbIoTe aims to solve them. symbIoTe has recently launched the Second Open Call, specifically calling for applicants to use the different interoperability solutions classified in four Levels.
  • Mr Philippe Krief (Eclipse Foundation) presented the AGILE-IoT project, which has initiated a kick-starter campaign for the AGILE IoT gateway based on Raspberry Pi and open source software. An overview of project goals and use cases was presented.
  • Mr Nenad Gligorić (DunavNET, RS) introduced the TagITSmart project and why smart ink in tags is useful for product traceability. The project has already closed its 2nd open call but it seems there is still some budget to possibly cover a third round of funding.

The networking session after the presentations was lively and rich of positive feedback from the local IoT community.

The IoT-EPI Inovation Night has completed the rich agenda of the  IoT-themed week in Zagreb, highly driven by the symbIoTe team. It followed the Zagreb Smart City award on Monday, where symbIoTe’s Ivana Podnar-Žarko served as a member of the jury, and anticipating the Eclipse DemoCamp held on Wednesday at UNIZG-FER.