Finalists win £10K each to improve London’s future

Sqwyre.com is a commercial location database supporting research into business properties in England and Wales. It aggregates open data on rental valuations, rates paid and vacancies, and employment into an integrated time-series database of individual industrial, office and retail business premises. They will be working with local government and high-street stakeholders to develop their data service to contribute to reducing vacancy rates and increasing opportunities for our entrepreneurs and communities.

The Vacancy Visualiser will help councils, businesses and the wider community to find vacant commercial properties that meet their needs.

Nquiringminds’ Economic Analyser applies advanced analytics, statistical techniques and visualisations to the problem of local economic planning of high streets. Economic Analyser securely combines data from a range of sources: historic and current local authority business rates data, including relief and vacancy data, Companies house open data, open online listings and mapping information. 

Noggin Property offers a new way to collect and share commercial property data, to give an up-to-date understanding and complete overview of high street properties. It will help councils and business owners drive the regeneration of town centres and create opportunities for new ideas to repurpose empty properties.

LYN Atelier’s solution is to create a semi-automated office fit-out process, simplifying choices and using second hand furniture to keep the costs down, giving access to great workspaces to a new section of the economy.

This proposal is to provide an easily adaptable fit out model that offers a cost-effective solution for newly built/shell & core spaces or empty premises, aiming to reduce property costs for the end user. It builds on the team’s existing fit out model, promoting reusable structures and environmentally friendly materials, simplified design and easy installation process. 

Inspired by temporary pavilions, Pavilion aims to create a rentable library of re-useable materials, able to be booked through an online platform and supported by installation, storage and maintenance. The kit of parts would be used to define, service and customise spaces depending on the use and length of time needed.

Their solution is a self-contained modular portable studio, intended to be integrated temporarily within the existing bare fabric of a leased space. Modules are insulated, contain essential services (water, electricity and heat where required) and can operate either independently or as a cluster. 

Emu Analytics is taking on the challenge of bringing together and visualising data on air quality, public health, transport data, and the impact of air pollution control measures in Lambeth Council – providing an innovative mapping software solution to underpin strategic intervention by the council to improve air quality and the health outcomes for their residents.

BlockDox’s solution is HEAL – a disruptive and innovative gamechanger providing an intelligent solution for Lambeth and other London Boroughs to model and assess health impacts from air quality interventions. HEAL provides modelling capability by ingesting outdoor air quality data, geopositioning data of vulnerable groups within Lambeth, and will visualise that data in a dashboard interface. Through HEAL, BlockDox aims to create a digital tool built on an existing indoor air quality, occupancy and energy analytics solution currently being used inside buildings in the UK and internationally.

Meahė Design is developing BAME Connect, a digital platform with three goals: to connect people, collect stories, and create culturally informed support networks.  BAME Connect will link users to the bereavement services that suit them best. It will also link them to each other. It’s social media feature will offer a safe space for sharing stories of COVID19 loss, with privacy as a first priority. The voices of BAME Londoners are crucial to the platform’s design. Meahė Design will work closely with BAME families, mental health specialists, and social researchers to maximise the impact of BAME Connect.

The Voxta Voce solution for the Mayors Resilience funds Bereavement Challenge is a 24/7 multilingual bereavement phone assistant helpline. People can call the virtual assistant for bereavement support and callers can choose to be connected to culturally appropriate bereavement counselling, local community groups, or for practical help. The helpline will be offered in English and an Asian language.

MatchingMind provides Artificial Intelligence (AI) driven matching with mental health and bereavement specialists, suited to minority communities. We match people with mental health specialists based on each person’s unique mix of health needs as well as age, culture, religion, sexual orientation, disabilities, and language requirements.

Loss in translation is a peer led grief activism project that aims to empower young people to transform their grief into compassion. Building on our award winning digital health service, Apart of Me, the team will work together with young people from minority ethnic backgrounds, to reduce the risk of complicated grief. They will give them the tools they need to become grief activists, and support others within their community to break through barriers that currently prevent them getting the right help.

Zipabout will provide a simple, free to use, information system to help people safely navigate around crowding, transport and health-led disruption when moving around London. Available to every business and venue in London, this will allow them to welcome their visitors, employees and customers back with confidence – scanning a QR code, following a link or pressing a button on the venue website is all the customer will need to do to receive personalised directions and realtime information on their channel of choice. 

TravelSpace is a platform created in response to Covid-19 to restore user confidence in the railway system and help operators manage demand. It is an overlay booking system that gives passengers virus safety support by providing the information needed to make safe decisions around public transport and to reduce crowding at stations and onboard services.

Aubin is a new door-to-door journey planner and companion app which empowers people to travel confidently when using public transport during Covid. Unlike other journey planner apps, Aubin includes specially designed features for passengers to plan journeys to minimise potential exposure to infection by choosing quieter routes and via lower infection areas.

The Workerbird solution helps gig economy workers understand their true hourly rate and whether this meets the London Living Wage. The simple app shows their data in a clear and impactful way helping them plan their finances. Gig economy workers are given valuable insights into their working patterns and can also come together as a group to get a complete picture of conditions across the sector.  Our aim is to empower gig economy workers with their own data so they have all the information they need to make the best decisions around their work.

Financial Freedom wants to create a platform that provides freelance workers with a one-stop shop to manage their finances, ensuring they have enough cash flow day-to-day and ‘runway’ between jobs. The core value proposition is to bring this information and insight together to reduce stress and improving the mental health of the user.

Designed in partnership with gig workers, Shiffle is pioneering a new way to ensure that gig work is fit and fair for all by helping people build whole incomes from fractions of work and enabling work providing platforms to demonstrate their contributions, in real time.

Finmo’s solution builds on their existing platform, where they provide software for sole traders and multi-job workers to track their income and expenses and a platform to connect with an accountant to affordably file a tax return. They will then develop this further to allow gig economy workers to understand their take-home pay and how their net hourly wage compares to the Living Wage.

Time to Spare is a software platform that allows local food providers to work together as a network to share information on the needs of their users, their stock levels and what services they are running. This helps each member to understand their own impact better and that of the network as a whole. All this can be shared on a public page, that allows those outside of the network to see how they can help and if they need support themselves, where that is available.

Local Food Network is a system of applications that open up a living, breathing picture of a local community’s food projects to each of its actors, and empowers them with the tools to fulfil their roles more impactfully.

The Spaze Food Management Platform (SFMP) is a cloud-based resource management platform that enables a systemic coordination of all local food stakeholders to effectively manage the supply and demand of food to tackle food insecurity. 

Public Markets Portal is a digital platform that enables market traders to view active trading opportunities, apply for and renew licenses across all London boroughs, and manage various aspects of their license, such as the pitch number, manager and assistants.

OpenMarkets.London will open up London’s local authority markets to more traders. As London reopens from lockdown, the vision of Openmarkets.London is to maximise the vibrancy of London’s markets, as diverse communities of trade and shopping.

Indi’s solution is a phased approach towards the automation of street trading for market operators, historically a time consuming and archaic process. The solution begins with solving the application process for London local authorities by consolidating and standardising the varying processes into a single format. This will be a secure digital platform covering the current legislation and legalities of the street licensing process across London. 

ZEV London provides an alternative type of renewable energy production – converting EV-taxi platform into a citizen renewable energy (RE) farm on blockchain. The new RE capacity is then tokenised on blockchain and given back to passengers as RE tokens to create incentive to use again. As the number of passengers grows, the RE farm becomes decentralised and citizen-owned, further encouraging crowd participation in transport and energy decarbonisation.

The Project proposes to install a floating solar array in London’s Royal Docks to provide clean renewable energy directly to London’s City Airport, as well as other local customers. Currently in the early test phase, Renewable Connections is working closely with the Royal Docks Management Authority and City Airport’s safeguarding team to make sure the project is technically suitable. 

Babylon-Blue’s floating communities consist of vessels which can utilise the Dock water and other natural sources such as solar, wind and water source heating and cooling systems to produce renewable, optimised through energy storage and distribution. Their Aquantum active-hull system combines this renewable heat and electrical energy production, storage, sustainable design and materials, resource efficiency and other innovative approaches. 

DynamicLink is a one-stop platform for the on-demand optimisation of freight journeys for operators. Based on the operator’s decisions, the platform learns to anticipate and helps with the proactive management of your fleet, supporting your long-term logistics strategy to help you reach your optimisation goals, while encouraging low carbon solutions (e.g. cargo bike logistics).

FlowOS is Waze for commercial fleets. It’s a dynamic fleet network that monitors the real time status of multiple vehicle fleets and identifies opportunities for those businesses to:

1. Adjust ETAs and itineraries based on collectively sensed information about road network conditions and resulting arrival and departure time estimates.
2. Coordinate pickup and drop off times to make it easier to transfer goods between vehicles and use depot space more efficiently.
3. Trade spare capacity and delivery obligations across the network to increase vehicle utilisation.

EMSOL empowers organisations to take steps every day to make a lasting difference in reducing pollution and meeting clean air targets. EMSOL goes beyond passive pollution monitoring, bringing together pollution data and fusing it with vehicle or asset location data to quickly and accurately identify real time sources of pollution.

Zedify’s mission is to transform urban logistics to create the healthier, more liveable cities of the future. Their unique sustainable logistics model is centred around hyperlocal microhubs which deploy fleets of electric cargo bikes across the city. At the very heart of their operations is ZAPP, a purpose-built mobility management tool which optimises delivery routes by reducing the number and length of journeys.