Meet REACH EXPERIMENT stage startup ITER IDEA

Hi ITER IDEA! Can you present your team and company to us?

Guido Mazza
Co-Founder ITER IDEA

How did you learn about REACH Incubator and what made you apply?

We collaborate with the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, The Data research centre, and with Confindustria Emilia Romagna, one of the Data Innovation Hubs for REACH.

Together with these two organizations, we came across the opportunity of REACH Incubator. We have matured experience working with open data and count on essential cooperation with a micro-mobility company, one of the leaders in Europe, and several municipalities in Italy. We positively evaluated the idea of connecting data and knowledge to an existing need expressed by a partner of the REACH Consortium, and so far, we were not disappointed.

Guido, Matteo, Sara, Fabio and Ricardo from ITER IDEA

You are tackling PLAY&GO’s challenge Social and Induced Perception of The Tourist Territorial Resources of a Destination. How do you think experimenting with and solving their data value chain challenge will set the foundations for scaling your solution?

Scaling a solution is always the most challenging part. However, we strongly believe POInt&Go have the chance to make an impact starting by solving the Play&Go Experience‘s challenge.

We questioned a significant partner from a different but related industry, such as the shared micro-mobility in Europe.

As a result, we could analyze common objectives and similar patterns. Plus the company itself showed interest in participating in the REACH Consortium as a Data Provider, opening a further reach and cities base.

We further showcased to some Italian City Halls, asking to participate in the designing and experimentation phase, such as in the city of Modena. The goal is to include new data providers according to the specific objectives of the cities and scale up via the partners’ cities’ reach.

Finally, the interest in the topics we address, such as cities’ mobility, sustainability and cultural destinations, is nowadays encouraged by the European objectives and the 2030 Agenda for sustainable development.

Please present your solution and elaborate on how it differentiates from the competition.

POInt&Go creates a digital touchpoint between public administrations and service providers operating in their cities in various strategic areas: culture and tourist destinations, mobility and the organization of urban spaces. The service supports the objectives of involving tourists and citizens, profiling and monitoring the movement flows of tourist destinations and during crowded events. The solution responds to the challenge of measuring the social and induced perception of the territorial tourism resources of a destination, obtaining data from augmented reality experiences designed to involve tourists and visitors in discovering attractions inclusively. Investigations have shown that the introduction of elements of gamification and augmented reality involves tourists more, favours the discovery of new destinations in the city and qualifies areas of interest for tourism and cultural purposes.

POInt&Go will offer interactive dashboards driven by AI capabilities and location technologies and will show: the number of accesses to AR experiences, the percentage of positive, negative or neutral iterations, and an average of the points of interest’s ratings, a geo-located map of initiatives in other smart communities and areas.

POInt&Go will enrich indicators with social platforms data such as Foursquare.com and Google Trends relative to the exact points of interest. With this double level of detail, POInt&Go will be able to better support administrations in finding integrated data and offer them the ability to customize their views, carefully selecting the data each department wishes to monitor.

The main competitors are the service providers who can generate reports on their platforms. As a differentiation, with POInt&Go, we propose a collaborative and mutually beneficial approach, a single and common platform to interact with municipalities, other companies and users themselves, creating subsequent advantages:

• A better profiling of the users following how they interact with other services offered in the city;
• Make partners known in new cities (and in tenders) based on other companies’ networks;
• Certify partners’ level of service with trusted and advanced technologies;
•  Discover new ways to interact with their own users.

Do you foresee any obstacles in successfully developing and commercializing your solution?

We are more than confident about the technical results and the development phase. We are passionate about innovative cloud technologies and sustainable yet scalable architectures operating with large amounts of data.

We are excited to integrate the REACH Toolbox capabilities into our common resources stack. 

For the commercialization plan, we are working hard to integrate the partners’ needs and desires as strategic insights into our vision without losing the original design and socially impactful value proposition. We think this is a crucial and challenging balance to grow our proposal, reaching more cities and service providers.