Dataconnexions, Etalab’s contest to identify the most promising up-and-coming open data startups, honored the 8 winners of its 4th edition yesterday. This time around, the jury was presided over by Blablacar co-founder Frédéric Mazzella and consisted of 30 key personalities from France’s tech and economic communities. Dataconnexions is truly sector agnostic as past and present entries have come from sectors as diverse as transport, tourism, housing, accessibility, food and many more.
Here’s a quick run through by category of the winners of the 4th edition:
- “General Public” – Open Food Facts: Drawing on their database of foods from around the world, they allow users to discover via a quick bar-code scan app the contents of their food and easily compare food products.
- “Utilities” – Open Meteo Forecast: A collaborative project of the ‘Open Meteo Foundation’, Open Meteo Forecast seeks to further open up the amount of weather data available to the public and drive more innovation using weather data
- “Professional” – Le-veilleur.fr: They strive to give the Enterprise world better access to public data via their custom search engine
- “Local services” – Calendeev: Looking to shake-up the way people organize their outings, Calendeev is ‘smart calendar’ that helps users better match their interests with their outings and daily life
- “Evasion”, one of two categories with 2 winners – Guido and Vamanos à la Playa: Guido (still in development) helps make those long trips on the autoroute more bearable by giving travellers commentary about sights, history and points of interest along their route. Vamanos a la Playa is a solution that offers beachgoers more information on beaches, including real-time information on weather, activities, water quality, accessibility, alerts, etc. It offers users interactivity as they can provide feedback on their beach going experiences.
- “Territories”, 2 winners – Métanol and CuteGIS: Métanol offers a service platform which eases the work for government agencies (municipalities, ministries, etc) as they attempt to better manage, collect and open up their data. CuteGIS is looking to change the way that we work with and view open data by rendering it more visual. Their platform offers users the possibility to more easily create visualization applications and/or applications that facilitate the collection of data that can be ‘attached’ to places or physical objects. Their application offers a range of other important functionalities as well, including event announcements and addition real-time updates, merging public data with user contributed data, etc.
Dataconnexions, which kicked off officially in 2012, actually occurs three times a year, so plenty of opportunity for you to throw the name in the hat if you’ve got an open data startup that stands out from the pack.