One of the main target groups of Helsinki Region Infoshare service is definitely students. HRI has had good cooperation with the Universities and Universities of Applied Sciences in Helsinki Region during the last years. This autumn HRI had a great cooperation with the Application Development Project course organized by the Metropolia University of Applied Science. The aim of this course is to create a proven business case with the developed application. The contribution of HRI was to enhance the utilization of open data in these business cases and applications.

There were altogether eight multidiciplinary and international teams participating this course consisting of the students from business, marketing and programming lines. There were several demo presentations, preliminary pitching and feedback sessions during the course. The final pitches were in December.

HRI team wanted to reward the members of the best team with movie tickets. HRI evaluated all the applications with the following criterias: usability and user-driveness, innovativeness of the idea, quality and sustainability etc. There were several great solutions regarding fishing, parking, dogs, motorcycling, housing etc.

The best solution from HRI point of view was the MOOSE. It is a mobile application that helps exchange students to find easily all the relevant information regarding Helsinki Region like housing, studying at Metropolia, events etc. The MOOSE is based on open data and available for free downloading at application stores (e.g. at Google Play) and has already one paying customer.

The developers of the MOOSE app are going to develop it further according to the feedback and in order to scale up and get new customers.

“The Moose App was conceived by exchange students, for exchange students. The aim was to have an information tool as user-friendly as possible, based on researched content and open data”, says Céline Missillier, a member of MOOSE app team.

The team is also planning to participate the DataBusiness Challenge competition organized by the 6Aika project. The aim of the DataBusiness Challenge is to encourage developers to utilize the open datasets and APIs provided by the six biggest cities in Finland. The deadline for submissions is 30.1.2017.

Congratulations and good luck the MOOSE!

HRI will continue this kind of cooperation in the future as well. If your training organization would like to do cooperation regarding open data (like support teachers to understand and harness the potential of open data) please send a message to hri [at] hel.fi and let see if it´s possible to organize something.