Inner-city parking service Parkhere gets support as it wins second place in the Fraunhofer Urban Futures conference and receives a $27,000 innovation network membership.
Parkhere, a Germany-based spinout from Technische Universität München, has won second place at the Fraunhofer Urban Futures conference and received membership to its innovation network.
The Urban Futures conference took place on November 25 2015 and saw 10 startups pitch their ideas to an audience made up of 250 representatives from politics, business and research. A jury made the final selection of three startups that won the innovation network membership.
Membership to the innovation network usually costs €25,000 ($27,000) and includes support to develop and implement ideas to create the “city of the future”.
Parkhere has developed a self-powered sensor system to help with the problem of parking in cities. The sensors transmit real-time data about the availability of parking spaces to minimise the time it takes for someone to find an open space. The technology will be tested in the real world next year as a way for electric cars to find unoccupied charging stations.
First place at the conference went to Green City Solutions, which wants to create living technological trees that are covered in cultivated moss to filter particulate matter and nitrogen oxides out of the air while also displaying relevant information about this process. Third place went to Breeze, a company that wants to monitor air quality and crunch the data in a cloud-based platform.
Alanus von Radecki, project manager at Fraunhofer, said: “As a research institution, we are happy to help new ideas get off the ground. Innovative concepts that connect the latest research with new approaches offer an ideal combination, especially for the cities of the future.”
