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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - WAZIHUB (Accelerating Open IoT and Big Data Innovation in Africa)

Teaser

Summary

WAZIHUB (in Swahili for Open-Hub) is an EU-Africa innovation project aiming to create a network of â€œOpen Hubsâ€ for designing IoT and Big Data solutions, adapted for the local environment. The vision of WAZIHUB is to exploit IoT potential and share IoT Technologies best-practices through the involvement of innovation communities and stakeholders. Our targets are young entrepreneurs (including woman), startups, developers and innovation Hubs operating at the local level, but also at the national level and African-wide. The project enables the creation of Open Hubs throughout Africa, where IoT technology can then be adapted to match local service needs. The project goal is to iterate and extract value from value-added IoT innovative services based on the in WAZIUP IoT technologies (www.waziup.io).

WAZIHUB target is to support, at large-scale, innovative users and usage of the above-mentioned technologies, with a goal towards the sustainability and wider-impact of the proposed solutions. Sustainability is one of the main concerns of innovation projects therefore the consortium will jointly target finding more and more users around WAZIHUB and offer a value to them based on their requirements, enabling them to easily tailor existing solutions to their needs.

In order to reach the WAZIHUB vision, the project addresses the following objectives:
â€¢ Accessibility of the technology, promoting the concept of a â€œsmart villageâ€ reference model: Local accessibility of the fine-grained, affordable, simple to use IoT-Cloud solutions/development-kits for rapid prototyping and testing ideas and fostering innovation
â€¢ Accessibility of process for start-up creation and acceleration: Through engagement of local innovation hubs, the creation of new IoT business spin-offs and start-ups and acceleration process is to be applied in a local and shared in an African-wide IoT WAZIHUB ecosystem (e.g. what steps and paths to be followed when, with what technology, for what purpose)
â€¢ Accessibility of business models and partnership for sustainability and growth-hacking: Enabling stakeholders to more easily catalyze around valid, innovative and tested propositions; WAZIHUB will show how to replicate the successful involvement of stakeholders around innovative services (e.g. what business model, funding, partnerships, first market replication).

Work performed

In the following, we detail the work performed and the core results achieved so far:

IoT prototyping kit and multi-cloud environment: The project released an integrated IoT prototyping kit which includes the WaziDev, Arduino and LoRa Sensor board. The board is manufactured from Africa. The WaziGate, LoRa gateway based on Raspberry-PI. WAZIHUB proposed a â€œhatâ€ called WaziHat which is assembled at the top of a Raspberry PI. The IoT LoRa network is fully integrated with the Cloud platform. The project developed a fully integrated multi-cloud environment including the edge-computing and the cloud platform

Online training tool and course: The project released an easy to use DIY online training tutorial tool for Arduino & Sensor. The tool can be hosted on a traditional Internet server (it is accessible on https://diy.waziup.io) or deployed on a completely autonomous system, even without Internet access: tablets, Raspberry. The project also designed the Online Course Program which is a structured set of courses for training and certifications. Videos, slides and tutorial materials have been produced and compiled in a comprehensive and consistent manner.
Innovation program: We designed and developed the WAZIHUB innovation program with three phases, phase1: Ideation and boothcamp, phase 2: MVP prototyping and phase 3: Growth hacking. 17 start-ups have been selected to prototype the ideas, out of them around 7 start-ups finished the testing and validation of the prototype.
Sustainability of the program: A call for application was launched to select the external hubs and trainers called â€œWAZIHUB Nodesâ€. Most than 200 applications were received, out of which 15 tech-hubs and trainers were selected. An online Artificial Intelligence competition was launched to increase the community presence and a total 677 data scientist enrolled for the competition. We have also designed a call for application for rapid application prototype and innovation competition. This open call will be launched 2nd year of the project.

Final results

The WAZIHUB IoT innovation program will be run with participating partner as well as external hubs. The program developed and implemented is aiming at supporting the creation of Innovations and startups with viability potential, to showcase their products and services to an audience of VCs and stakeholders in the IoT ecosystem. The program involves the organization of hackathons (WAZIhacks) to identify and select IoT innovations and startups for the accelerator program. Startups who make it to the accelerator program will be provided with technical training, product design & development, mentorship, business training, market research and marketing strategy & implementation. A virtual accelerator program is developed to complement physical accelerators programs so that it will be possible to support applicants from locations with a partner hub for the acceleration program.
The core expected results of the WAZIHUB innovation program are:
- To prototype hundreds of IoT innovative products and services and out of them 30% should be female lead and 50% of them should engage with the users.
- To development of IoT regional ecosystem with the Hub as a center of the ecosystem. The project will partnership with 40 tech hubs and 200 partners (e.g. industries, SMEs, start-ups, etc).
These results will be achieved based on the Open source cutting-edge technologies. The project will develop a specialized IoT loRa application prototyping kit considering the African countries needs on connectivity, cost, energy-consumption and robustness. The kit includes the generic end-to-end solutions/components from sensors up to applications for development of IoT applications. The whole Kit is open for anyone to use and it is also developed based on the existing open source hardware and software platform such as Arduino, Raspberry-pi, LoRa, Orion Context broker, etc. The turnkey solutions also include the large-scale multi-cloud environment including the local and global cloud. The local cloud is developed based on the advanced edge computing platform that means the full-stake IoT application can be run at the Gateway (e.g. Local cloud level). Each of the tech-hubs partners will host the local cloud and can operate with or without internet connection. The local cloud is fully synchronized with the global cloud witch is running in Amazon AWS hosting service. The environment will be autonomous enough for synchronization. The local cloud will be highly energy efficient can run in single PC or Gateway. The IoT LoRa development kit will also include the local cloud for rapid IoT application deployment. We will also have deployed the model of IoT smart village as entry point for IoT connectivity and a model how the village community could be benefited from such IoT infrastructure.