Technology Strategy Board Launches £5 Million Innovation in Location-Based Services
The aim of the Innovation in Location-Based Service competition is to support projects that capitalise on the increasing coverage, accuracy and speed of global navigation satellite systems (GNSS). This includes GPS and other non-satellite technologies such as iBeacon, Wi-Fi and Rafio Frequency Identification (RFID) to build innovative location-based services or improve the user experience of existing services. Users are at the heart of the competition, and the use of user-centred design methods to explore the opportunities that arise from location-based contextual data is encouraged.
Up to £5 million is available to support collaborative R&D projects, with projects expected to range in size between £400,000 and £1 million. The amount of grant that is allocated will depend on the type of research being carried out and the type of organisation involved.
Only UK-based companies and research organisations are eligible to apply. Projects must be business-led and collaborative, and last between one and two years. The competition is primarily looking to fund industrial research with a business partner attracting public funding to support the project costs. Partnerships can include any mix of businesses, of various sizes, as well as research and non-profit organisations.
The Technology Strategy Board is seeking proposals that use location data to build services capable of addressing real-life problems. Proposals should address or lead to one or more of the following:
• Services that optimise relationships between resources, technology, communities, businesses and events in the local environment.
• Applications that manage multiple data sets and integrate them in interesting and original ways to produce accurate information for unique or niche services.
• Applications that exploit indoor positioning systems, such as Wi-Fi, RFID and iBeacon, together with satellite navigation systems to track users, locations or resources.
• Applications that create a sustainable service by using content from existing open data platforms such as Open Street Map.
• Services that generate useful crowd-sourced content which refines and improves the service and is of value to third parties.
• Applications that seamlessly use mobile augmented reality (MAR), not as a novelty but to enhance the service and improve user experience.
Applicants are required to register before 11 June 2014 in order to enter the competition, and the deadline for submission of applications is on 18 June 2014. Both deadlines are at 12pm.
Link to scheme pages: https://www.innovateuk.org/documents/1524978/1866952/Innovation%20in%20location-based%20services%20-%20Competition%20guidance
