Honorees Span the Globe from Europe, Africa, and the Americas
Norcross, Georgia, 15 December 2016 –Hexagon Geospatial is proud to announce the winners of the IGNITE competition. The IGNITE competition challenged innovative thinkers to brainstorm real-world problems that could benefit from geospatial technology. They were then asked to use Hexagon Geospatial’s platform to build applications – Hexagon Smart M.Apps – that transform their ideas into dynamic information services.
Tomasz Berezowski Takes Home $100,000 Grand Prize
The Grand Prize-winning Smart M.App was Mind M.App by Tomasz Berezowski and his Graph Revolution team from The Wroclaw Institute in Poland. As Grand Prize Winner, Tomasz will receive a $100,000 prize to invest in his burgeoning geospatial business.
“Mind M.App introduces a new data modeling paradigm, allowing you to discover hidden links and uncover spatial patterns,” said Mladen Stojic, President, Hexagon Geospatial. “Mind M.App exemplifies the power of a Hexagon Smart M.App: a dynamic tool for re-envisioning geospatial data in a way that elicits and communicates new insights that can help solve a variety of real-world problems. Congratulations, Tomasz!”
The Mind M.App is the first Smart M.App to combine a graph data model with Hexagon Geospatial’s platform. Mind M.App allows you to create maps of associations between entities. You can record complex knowledge gathered during research or an investigation and combine it with external data sources using RDF technology. Once you have your mind map created, you can discover hidden links and spatial patterns to provide new insight. This can help in a variety of uses, from helping investigative journalists and forensic scientists to visualizing office locations and tracing genealogy.
Second and Third Place Winners: Paul Guerts and Noel Khan
The second place, $50,000-winning Smart M.App was Smart Emissions by Paul Guerts and the Municipality of Nijmegen in the Netherlands. This Smart M.App combines readings from air and noise pollution sensors and visualizes it in a map, facilitating meaningful Smart City conversations between citizens and their government.
The third place winner was Noel Khan and his AiGIS: US Tax Maps application. This Smart M.App is a fully automated application that helps Tax Assessor offices efficiently georeference their US Assessor maps to leverage the spatial relationships in their data. Noel won $25,000 that he can now reinvest in his new business.
Other Honorable Mentions
Because of the high level of creativity and innovation shared by the finalists throughout this competition, it was a genuine challenge to determine only three winners. Andrew Kerr from Sweden, receives an Honorable Mention for his Everybody Counts: My Safari Smart M.App. This application combines Smart M.App technology with crowd-sourcing smart phone apps used by ecotourists to help perform a census of endangered species in African Safari parks.
Jens Hiestermann of South Africa also garnered an Honorable Mention for his GeoFarmer – A Monthly Crop Monitoring Tool. This ground-breaking Smart M.App uses climatic data and satellite imagery to help agricultural estimators, insurers, and commodity traders determine field-specific crop status.
All of the other finalists who submitted working Smart M.Apps by the deadline will also receive $5,000. You can read more about the finalists and see more about the IGNITE apps on the M.App Exchange.
“These finalists represent some of the most creative and passionate thinkers in the geospatial arena,” said Hexagon Geospatial President Mladen Stojic. “We started IGNITE with the vision that this could help transform maps from static pictures of the past into dynamic tools for communicating insight. Every competitor accomplished exactly that, and I am pleased to reward them for their labor. I am especially excited to see these ideas, and ideas of others who have been inspired by these IGNITE innovators, come to fruition.”
About the IGNITE Competition
Open to competitors worldwide, IGNITE participants learned about the Hexagon Smart M.App platform through a series of IGNITE sessions held in cities across the globe. Then they compiled their ideas and submitted them for initial judging. Mladen Stojic announced the 20 finalists in June 2016, at HxGN LIVE in Anaheim, California, USA. The finalists were given the opportunity to attend in-person training on the M.App Studio, the platform used to design and build Hexagon Smart M.Apps.
In the second phase, the finalists worked with mentors from Hexagon Geospatial to build their Smart M.Apps and publish them to the M.App Exchange for purchasing. Their completed Smart M.Apps were scored by a panel of industry judges based on criteria ranging from potential impact to the practical usability.
The competition has been one of the most successful HeroX competitions ever, with over 150 submissions.
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About Hexagon Geospatial
Hexagon Geospatial helps you make sense of the dynamically changing world. Known globally as a maker of leading-edge technology, we enable our customers to easily transform their data into actionable information, shortening the lifecycle from the moment of change to action. Hexagon Geospatial provides the software products and platforms to a large variety of customers through direct sales, channel partners, and Hexagon businesses. For more information, visit www.hexagongeospatial.com or contact us at marketing@hexagongeospatial.
Hexagon Geospatial is part of Hexagon, a leading global provider of information technologies that drive quality and productivity improvements across geospatial and industrial enterprise applications. Hexagon’s solutions integrate sensors, software, domain knowledge and customer workflows into intelligent information ecosystems that deliver actionable information, automate business processes and improve productivity. They are used in a broad range of vital industries. Hexagon (Nasdaq Stockholm: HEXA B) has more than 16,000 employees in 46 countries and net sales of approximately 3.1bn USD.
Learn more at hexagon.com.