£50,000 competition for small and medium firms

A £50,000 competition for small and medium sized enterprises has been launched at the Science and Technology Facilities Council’s Hartree Centre, near Warrington.
It offers enterprises with no more than 250 employees the chance to win “Proof of Princple” vouchers to help them unlock the business opportunities offered by the Internet of Things (IOT).
The competition is building on the Hartree’s transformation of STFC’s Daresbury Laboratory (pictured) into an IoT “living lab” – one that is instrumented, interconnected and intelligent.
The Hartree team is committed to accelerating progress in this game-changing field and has launched the competition for SMEs to secure expert support for their own IoT projects.
SMEs each have the chance to win vouchers worth up to £25,000 to exploit this emerging area of technology.
David Moss, advanced technologies solutions manager at the Hartree
Centre, said:“Embracing hardware, software, system architectures, sensing and signalling technologies, data storage and analytics, social media exploitation and an intuitive visualisation portal, this ground-breaking
demonstrator, developed here at Hartree, offers clear evidence of how the centre’s capabilities can benefit all types of organisation.
“This new competition offers the perfect conditions for SME’s to use
their own expertise in collaboration with the Hartree Centre, to provide new opportunities for working with UK businesses.”
The core concept behind the IoT is to use sensing and internet technologies to incorporate all kinds of devices, objects and systems into networks that collect, exchange, analyse and exploit data –
providing the platform for informed decisions and practical actions that enhance efficiency, improve productivity, boost business growth and benefit peoples’ lives.
The IoT is one of the fastest moving in technology today.
Collecting, exchanging, analysing and exploiting data through networks incorporating all kinds of sensor – and internet-enabled devices and objects – it offers huge potential to boost business…and not just for companies harnessing the technologies but for those supplying them too.
The Hartree Centre is at the forefront of this field.