Telefonica’s Event "Apps sociales sumate a la oportunidad"

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The plan of the event was to present 3 initiatives: M-Inclusion project, UEIA and Incita in a 20 minutes presentation.

The presenter of the speakers and coordinator of the final Q&A from the presentations was Luis Angel Galindo, Director of “Innovación 2.0” at Telefonica.

The structure of the presentations was the following:

• M-Inclusion: The speaker was Maria Jose Cantarino; Corporate Responsibility Manager at Telefónica and M-Inclusion’s project coordinator.
• Incita: The speaker was Gorka Jimenez, CEO of Incita; a company focused on applied innovation based on mobile technologies as a path to efficiency, accessibility and cost savings.
• UEIA: The speaker was May Escobar, co-founder of UEIA; UEIA is the first company to promote technological and social entrepreneurship and accelerate disruptive startups with social basis.

See the video of the event:

In the event, was mentioned the real business opportunity that exists leveraging the mobile penetration, which is the 87 % of world population with 5.9 billons of devices, and considering that 15% of the world population suffers from some kind of disability, and the 80% of these people with disabilities are in developing countries as Latam countries, according to WHO. It has to be notice that in Latam, the mobile penetration is higher than the world media, reaching 120% penetration (602 million of people and 703 million of devices).

Also was explained the needs of the groups at risk of exclusion: more autonomy, less dependence on regular care and attendance, increase access to basic health and education ... and to achieve that, is required user-friendly applications at affordable costs and working in environments with low quality of infrastructure and equipment.

Other main topic of the event referred to the potential for developers in a new technical field in the security: biometrics.

It can be use via mobile to identify individuals as a very useful tool for people with disabilities, allowing them to log in multiple ways: voice, signature, a photo of the hand, etc.. Until now, it has been used in access control, military applications, borders, etc. and the challenge for entrepreneurs is to extend it to our daily lives. Also, Gorka Jimenez (Incita) provided to the developers their own API to enhance the implementation of biometrics in mobile terminals.

The importance of taking advantage of technology strengths: speed, scalability and lower investment need, to create social enterprises with a viable business model was stressed during the event, being one of the central topics.

One of the examples of startup accelerated by UEIA is “Disabled Park”, a free mobile application that reports the location of 12,000 parking spaces for people with disabilities in 25 Spanish cities. The creators, three friends who have had the problem of not find adapted parking spaces, provide to the users and businesses the opportunity to sponsor the application or give donations, in order to fund the initiative.

Other success stories that were mentioned were “DoaFund”, a crowd founding application to fund families facing the eviction from their houses through disinterested donations; “TripDrop”, an application to inform those travelers who like to travel all around the world how must carry his backpack to help the inhabitants of the area that they are traveling or “Afables”, a recommender of social assistance at home, an application to help to know with who you leave your loved ones when we hire home care services.

Please download the presentations of the speakers:

• María José Cantarino, M-Inclusion Project Coordinator
• Gorka Jimenez, President of Incita
• May Escobar, Co-Founder of UEIA