“PARSEC — Promoting the international competitiveness of European Remote Sensing companies through Cross cluster collaboration” is an EU project which aspires to provide start-ups and SMEs with the necessary resources to develop and launch Earth Observation (EO) based products and services into the market. This will be realized through a comprehensive acceleration program, offering a total of €2.5 Million-euro equity-free funding to applicants, alongside coaching, training and market entry support.

The PARSEC Accelerator invited SMEs, startups and aspiring founders keen to develop innovative services for the Food, Energy or Environment sectors to apply to its first Open Call, seeking to fuel these innovations with data from Earth Observation satellites.

100 applicants were selected as winners of this Open Call and will receive €10.000 in equity-free funding and access to the PARSEC Accelerator business ecosystem and support services. Winners will get the chance to proceed to the second stage, where up to €50.000 (per participant) and further support will be made available.

Latitudo 40 has been selected from among 348 applicants from 36 countries.

We are happy and honored to have won one of the 100 places inside Parsec Accelerator:

“Having EARSC as coordinator will guarantee an in-depth expertise in business innovation, market uptake, R&D commercialisation, design and deployment of big data applications, business clusters and accelerators within Earth Observation and emerging industries.

Within the project we will have the opportunity to collaborate with the best European startups in the field of geoinformation and earth observation to build together new solutions for the space sector.

In this perspective we see the business catalysts of PARSEC as an important opportunity to develop a new application in urban planning and energy infrastructures monitoring through the features of BIGDATA TOOLBOX and IN SITU DATA HUB and the great opportunities of EOMall.”

The Big Data Toolbox will help companies harness the power of big EO data by providing services for pre-processing, integration, sampling, data fusion, analytics and visualization of heterogeneous data. The toolbox will allow the reduction of data volume, while preserving and enriching the information content of the data. It will transform raw EO data into spatial or statistical databases with structured information, ready to be used by a new product or service.

The In situ Data Hub is being developed as an active, multi-source repository with automated discovery, retrieval, harmonisation and transformation services. It will provide access to real- and past-time data in a structured way (for machine-machine communication) and an interface that offers users the ability to visualise the spatial information with charts, tables or maps.

Data will be exportable from the user interface to excel or csv.

It will be possible to communicate with:

  • sensor networks,
  • independent IoT devices,
  • citizen observatories,
  • crowdsourcing,
  • unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV),
  • other online structured (e.g. XML or JSON services, databases, csv or excel files) and unstructured (sensor measurements in web page tables) data sources available.

The Latitudo 40 project for the Parsec application aims to bring meaningful insights for solar panel developers and for urban planners to better mine geographic data for the most optimal configurations, from new installations positioning to issue detection through a solar panel concentration index and to monitor urban quality of life, combining Car Index Concentration, ground temperature and green areas concentration.

Thanks to Parsec we will build a cross-sectoral/cross-border ecosystem whereby Latitudo 40 and innovative start-ups will gain:

Access to knowledge (provision of a holistic portfolio of support services, including market, technology and investment training/ information as well as tailored coaching support);

Access to technology (through three large scale demonstrators, acting as enablers for the development of new EO-based products/services);

Access to capital (an innovative selection and funding scheme to ensure selection of high-potential ideas);

Access to market (incl. cross-border and cross-sectoral matchmaking, investment readiness, export promotion).

The whole Latitudo 40 team congratulates the winning startups and is looking forward to the next kick-off meeting at the end of March in Stuttgart.