And the Challenges winners are...

Zeitfenster, Trimaps and Pathway Authoring Tool for Museums!!!

On 29 April 2014, the finalists of the Europeana Creative Challenges in History Education and Natural History Education were invited to Brussels to pitch their concepts and ideas at the New Frontiers for European Entrepreneurs event in Brussels.

The pitching session was the last part of the Challenges. The invited finalists had already passed the online judging round that ended on 14 April 2014. In the Natural History Education theme, the application Pathway Authoring Tool for Museums from Agro-Know won the competition. Within the second Challenge track in the History Education theme the jury nominated two winners: Trimaps and Zeitfenster.

Nico Kreinberger, eCreative Team, presenting the Challenges

‘The Pathway Authoring Tool for museums and science centres is a web-based tool for building complex web resources with a story-like structure. It empowers education and content experts at museums to make the most of authoring, publishing and sharing technologies, while using, reusing & remixing the world’s high quality collections of open digital resources. The tool also aims to collect visitor data, enabling museums to make better decisions about visitors’ preferences and needs’ says Madalina, representative from Agro-Know and pitcher for this tool.

Madalina, from Pathaways Authoring Tool for Museums winner of the Natural History Education Challenge

Trimaps is a web-based tool including a mobile application to enable geolocation on historical maps contained in the Europeana database. With reference to the Europeana database, the project aims to re-use historical maps at touristy sites. When you visit a city, and you are told ´there was a fortress here 500 years ago´, having access to a historic map of the city would help build the picture. With it, you can see precisely where you are on that map. The objective is to make these maps available on mobile devices and enable geolocation on them.

Jonathan, from Trimaps one of the winners of the History Education Challenge

The second winner Zeitfenster is a mobile application for smartphones and tablets. The application allows users to time travel through cities, places and events and experience different times and topics exactly at the location where it took place years ago.Zeitfenster uses historical images and films mixed with authenticated background information using Augmented Reality, Location and Cloud Based Services. All of this allows users to merge the real-time environment with the images to get feeling of going back and forth in time. They also can take an image of their own to personalise and record their experience to share with other people. The app also lets them buy historical stock images as gallery prints. ‘With this, we create cultural awareness and offer an emotional approach to historical topics in order to experience them on location,’ said the Zeitfensterapp developers.

Zeitfenster team, video pitch (the team was unfortunately not able to be present at the event)

For the next three months the Challenge winners will receive a tailored hands-on Incubation Support Package provided by experts from the cultural and creative industries in order to help them to spin their product successfully into the market.

Europeana Creative Jury meeting after the pitches

Europeana Creative congratulates the winners and is looking forward to the future collaboration!

And don't worry if you missed your chance to enter the first round of Europeana Creative challenges, we will soon be opening two new challenges relating to Tourism and Social Networks and we strongly encourage you to apply if you have a creative idea on how to re-use Europeana content for these two new themes. Keep checking our website for more info.