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    Club News: ÖAMTC supports innovation with the Start Up Challenge

    10 January 2018
    ÖAMTC launched the Start-up Challenge to support young entrepreneurs with innovative business ideas and creative solutions and help them develop their businesses. Three starts-ups have been selected as winners. They will be offered workplaces at the ÖAMTC Mobility Centre, support with their national and international roll-out and the wealth of knowledge and experience of ÖAMTC experts in all sorts of sectors. Individual coaching sessions are also on offer through the INiTS university start-up service. The winning projects are: The Volare Project, which is developing a highly automated aircraft for passenger transport. With its compact design and vertical take-off and landing capability, it is ideally suited for operations in populated areas. And over the next four years the company will be focusing its efforts on successfully developing a fully functional prototype. Roomchooser, a booking portal for barrier-free hotel rooms. This particular start-up offers a solution to the often tedious and complicated process of finding suitable hotel rooms. It also solves the problem of often incorrect or incomplete information communicated by hotels regarding their own in-house barrier-free access. BikerSOS, a mobile app capable of detecting accidents involving motorcyclists and automatically dialling a (private or institutional) emergency contact number to report the accident and get help. The app also records biking tours and shares them with friends. The three winners of the Challenge now look forward to moving into the ÖAMTC Mobility Centre in January 2018 and obtaining a year’s worth of support and assistance from the ÖAMTC. The Challenge was looking for start-ups with new solutions in the following areas:
    • Mobility and the interconnected world
    • Road safety
    • Everyday assistance and emergency assistance
    • Family and the community
    43 start-ups applied, six made the final, and three have now emerged as winners. After a one-month evaluation phase, the six best start-ups were invited to attend the closing event at the ÖAMTC headquarters, where the finalists gave their presentations before a five-person jury and many ÖAMTC employees.