A little over a year ago, the first ever Wayra Week took place at Campus Party Colombia with 10 lucky projects selected to move into the inaugural Wayra Academy in Bogota.
Last week, Campus Party Berlin played host to the 13th Wayra Week – this time for Germany – with nine projects selected to move into the new Academy in Munich in a few weeks time.
The speed at which Wayra has grown is simply phenomenal. At the Berlin presentation, Wayra CEO, Gonzalo Martin-Villa revealed that close to 15,000 projects have been submitted since it launched and over 140 start ups are currently being incubated in academies across Latin America and Europe.
EU Commissioner and Vice President, Neelie Kroes, was on hand to present the awards to the winning German projects alongside Telefonica Europe CEO, Jose Maria Alvarez Pallete, and Telefonica Germany CEO, Rene Schuster.
The nine start ups that will move into the Munich Academy span a range of sectors from apps to social networking to machine-to-machine communications. Cleverize for instance is an e-learning application that aims to turn a smartphone into a class room, delivering a range of learning content through the Cloud. While Pockets United is an m-commerce service for groups of friends to easily split day-to-day costs amongst themselves.
Each of the winning projects not only get a new home in O2’s magnificent Munich HQ building, but they will also receive invaluable mentoring and advice from Telefonica experts in areas ranging from law and HR through to technical areas such as M2M and m-commerce.
The nine winning projects are:
| Start up | Business idea |
| Fabbeo | Online marketplace for 3D print services. |
| i-Frontdesk | Modular application for tablets that hotels can use to offer their guests personal concierge services. |
| Mynudge | M2M solution for observing and evaluating the fulfilment of personal goals. |
| Chuisy | Social app for sharing decision-making. |
| Cleverlize | Cloud application for creating and sending out e-learning lesson units for smartphones. |
| Pockets United | Service for groups of friends to record and share their everyday costs. |
| Spotfav | Real-time weather forecasts using HD webcams, meteorological stations and the wisdom of the crowd. |
| Kisibox | Transforms your smartphone into a house key. |
| Clearkarma | Smartphone app showing ingredients in food items. |
Campus Party also saw Wayra welcome the new Director of the Wayra German Academy, Tanja Kufner (the first female Director of an Academy). Tanja will be supported by Vice Director, Stefani Poschl, who joins from Telefonica Germany’s Business Customer division.
Campus Party brings together some of the brightest minds in technology and Wayra identifies and supports those that are turning technology into great business ideas. The two are perfect partners and both are making a strong contribution to the celebration and promotion of innovation.
Next step… Wayra Week Ireland, starting on September 4th!
