AppCampus, a mobile application acceleration program funded by Microsoft and Nokia and set up in Aalto University, Finland, has grown from an ambitious concept to a globally known program that has attracted thousands of developers worldwide. On Friday 7th of June AppCampus celebrated it’s 1st year anniversary at the Open Innovation House with key note sessions and talk about apps economy.
Pekka Sivonen, head of AppCampus, highlighted the achievements of the first year: The program brought in over 2600 submissions from 96 different countries, 166 teams got funded, 5 million was committed in investment and 3 batches of AppCademy camps were held with the 3rd one on-going at the moment.
“The feedback we got from AppCademy alumni surpassed our expectations: developers valued the advice and help they got through the camp even higher than the financial grant they received”, comments Paolo Borella, Director of AppCademy. As one of the first graduates of AppCademy, Kimo Boissonnier from Haunted puts it: “Financial grant from AppCampus is what initially attracted us to apply for the program, but having gone through the four-week camp is what really enabled us to accelerate the launch of our app and get it to a high-quality standard”.
“We have released 14 apps so far and each one of them is at the top of its category in terms of quality. For the next twelve months the goal is to continue releasing and marketing the apps while keeping their quality at the best possible level”, says Pekka Sivonen.
Director Marko Turpeinen from EIT ICT Labs Helsinki Node presented the EIT ICT Labs and Smart Spaces Action Line, where one of the focus areas is to bring mobile users situationally relevant information from the Internet radically faster than today. The biggest market areas include retail and urban environments. “It’s not only the speed that matters, but we also need meaningful apps. The work done by AppCampus and EIT ICT Labs do support each other. And also there is a natural path from an AppCampus funded start-up wanting to grow in Europe to apply for the business development acceleration at EIT ICT Labs”, explains Marko.
