The Smart Spaces Business Community kicked off its activities on Tuesday 2 February in Helsinki. The community focuses on services and solutions for the retail sector. It includes 15 small and medium sized companies from 8 European countries. By bringing these companies together EIT ICT Labs aims to boost their business and tie them close to its operations to speed up the go-to-market of retail innovations.
Smart retail has been chosen as one of the key focus areas of EIT ICT Labs. People’s shopping habits are changing rapidly. More and more people go to physical shops just to try out things, but then compare prices and buy online. The traditional brick-and-mortar shops are actively looking for completely new ways to attract customers.
Keynote speaker Heli Vainio, director for the Kamppi shopping center in Helsinki, called for solutions that would help her know exactly how many people visit the mall, at what time, how they move around, how much money they spend, whether it changes from day to day or season to season. “We need facts. This kind of information would help us serve our customers better,” explained Heli who has over 30 years of experience in retail.
Community companies
The community companies will get exposure to potential customers through e.g. sponsored participation in trade events like EuroCIS in February. They will be provided with market insights and the EIT ICT Labs’ business developers support them in international growth. The companies will be able to use the EIT ICT Labs Co-location Centres in 9 countries for short term office space or for meetings with potential clients.
The 15 companies include:
Casambi (Finland) offers lighting control solutions for the lighting industry that help to bring adjustable lighting to mainstream consumers.
Ediam Sistemas (Spain) creates augmented reality mobile applications for retail, manufacturing, healthcare, real estate, marketing and cultural heritage.
Hyghlyne (UK) helps lifestyle brands and retailers to get, keep and grow consumers by bringing a personalised discovery, shopping and lifestyle belonging experience to their consumers on a mobile application.
Innorange (Finland) provides location based marketing solutions and consumer analytics for brick and mortar retail stores.
Neosensys (France) provides in-store consumer insight from video analysis
Nimble Devices’s (Finland) product Steerpath™ is an indoor positioning and navigation technology for mobile applications.
Proxible (The Netherlands) is specialized in 'Internet of Things'. Their location based platform makes environments smart by connecting online information with physical objects. Proxible has developed dedicated end-to-end solutions for retail, city exploration and leisure.
Quuppa (Finland) provides reliable real-time positioning for location-based solutions and services. Quuppa technology is being successfully applied across various industries including healthcare, industrial internet, retail, security and sports.
Roidu (Finland) is a cloud service platform for distributing any content effortlessly to all mobile devices. Roidu provides sizeable cost advantages and time savings when group of mobile devices need to be used in a controlled manner.
Selitera's (Sweden) patented Semantic Light platform could be used, for instance, at fashion shops that are displaying their products on mannequins or shelves. The shopper, using Selitera’s app, points her phone to the product she is interested in. The product will lit up and more information about it will appear on her phone. With just one click she can also purchase it, bookmarked, or share it in social media. See video
Shorum’s (Germany) technology enables the consumer to conveniently pull up information on all products in a showroom as well as to collect, compare and share them. Products can be ordered from anywhere and anytime through the mobile app.
Smart Signs (The Netherlands) makes dynamic and personal wayfinding possible in buildings like offices, hospitalsmarts and the surrounding environments. See video
Trilogis (Italy) develops innovative solutions tailored to our customer’s needs within the field of GIS (Geographic information System) and LBS (Location Based Services).
U-Hopper’s (Italy) product RetailerIN is a smart retailer analytics platform, which transforms data on how customers move inside a store into actionable information, enabling shop managers to optimize the store layout and operations in order to increase profitability.
Zoined (Finland) Retail Analytics gives retailers actionable insights easily and visually. With Zoined's automatic email reports and browser based portal you can keep track and analyse your business any time and anywhere, also on mobile devices.
