Monday 17 November 2014

Construction App Challenge - End of Round 1

By Vladimir Bataev

Yesterday, Nov 17, 23:59 CET was the deadline for submitting ideas for the first European mobile app challenge in construction organized by MobiCloud.

While the submissions are en route to the expert panel that will evaluate them and determine the winner, we can look at the where the ideas came from.

Geography


Ideas arrived from 9 countries in total, where the expected Western European participants were joined by their peers in Russia, the US and Singapore.



47 ideas were submitted. After merging duplicates and politely refusing submissions from existing products to keep the competition focused as much as possible on new ideas, we ended up with 37 unique ideas. These ideas were distributed in the following way, with the UK taking responsibility for almost half of all submissions:


Occupation


We aimed the competition at students (and their professors) and then at potential startups. To our surprise, contributors working for existing companies (most often, in the construction industry) were more active than their rivals from academia. 6 ideas came from freelancers and people who did not want to disclose their occupation status.


Activity


We encouraged people to submit more than one idea and we were heard - 5 participants submitted 2 ideas or more.

We know from experience that coming up with good ideas for mobile apps in construction is not easy and we were amazed with the amount of high quality submissions we received. We expected about 20 good submissions, so were pleasantly surprised to have received almost twice that amount (which means double the work for our experts, but we have already recruited new experts to evaluate all additional submissions).

We would like to thank all the participants for their efforts. We will shortly announce the precise schedule for announcement of the top rated submissions and, of course, the winner, as well as the online webinar, where our experts will discuss the best ideas.


Monday 10 November 2014

MobiCloud ShowCase

On the 30th October MobiCloud was showcased at the COMIT/Fiatech conference which was held at the Crystal in London. This two-day event attracted 150 delegates from all over the world and focused on the use of mobile technology in the construction industry. 


The event was chaired by Phil Jackson of the Institute of Civil Engineers and included speakers such as Richard Lane from the UK Government BIM Taskgroup. More information about the conference, including photographs and all the presentations, can be found on the COMIT website.


MobiCloud had a stand at the event and Martin Wilson presented a brief overview of the MobiCloud project in the morning on the 30th. In the evening after drinks and light refreshments a longer showcase was delivered including a demonstration of the Site Diary application by Otis Burris (Appear). This generated a lot of interest, particularly among delegates from the US.


Vladimir Bataev (EsperantoXL) then described the MobiCloud App Challenge  and gave an example of some of the ideas that had already been submitted. This was also well received and led to lively discussion about other potential applications of MobiCloud to the construction industry and the shortcomings of current mobile solutions.