Vodafone Italia's second tender is underway "Action for 5G” dedicated to startups and small and medium-sized enterprises - states the press release released by the telephone company - who want to contribute their innovative ideas to the development of 5G in Italy with projects of robotics, sensors, connected devices of Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality.
Here are the requirements to participate:
- projects must use at least one of the distinctive features of 5G: connection speeds of up to 10 Gigabits per second, latency below 10 milliseconds, high connection density.
The one launched today, Thursday 4 October, is the second "Action for 5G" call launched by Vodafone with the PoliHub of the Milan Polytechnic. The project includes 4 annual calls for tenders for a total investment of 10 million.
For this second call, Vodafone is making available 2,5 million, technical-specialist consultancy services on 5G and access to Vodafone Italia's 5G Open Lab and to the Campus Open Lab of the Milan Polytechnic. The collection of applications opens today until January 31st. The best projects will be subject to due diligence by Italian investors and industry experts, will enter the "5G Design" phase starting from April to June 2019 and will access a first round of financing to develop the project idea from a 5G perspective.
The projects will be evaluated by a committee made up of members of Vodafone Italia, the Milan Polytechnic and venture capitalists, which will select the most innovative and strategic finalists.
Finally, the two winning startups of the first tender were chosen, they come from the world of sport and assisted maintenance: Math&Sport e weAR. The first presented a project that aims to make the fan's experience in the stadium more interactive, using Augmented Reality to get game information in real time. The second, again through Augmented Reality, develops maintenance solutions that enable interactive manuals and remote collaboration in real time between an on-site employee and a remote expert. Both startups are now developing the 5G prototype of their project with Vodafone.
