Inmark

INMARK is a business and marketing consulting company based in Madrid with a relevant background in IST programmes. INMARK has a proven record of 30 years in business, starting at the heart of Southern Europe and expanding its activities throughout EU and Latin America. In spite of its SME profile, INMARK has branches in 7 countries, totalling some 150 qualified staff members. INMARK provides a wide range of consultancy and management services to International bodies, governments, large corporations and SMEs in fields comprising Strategic market positioning; Business and Projects implementation planning and advice; Functional and resources optimisation initiatives and ultimately, extracting best possible value added from the adequate usage of human, technological, organisational and financial resources.

Since 1992, INMARK has been involved in more than 25 RTD projects co-financed by the European Commission, mainly in the area of IST. Under the 4th, 5th and 6th Framework Programmes, INMARK participated in projects concerned with evaluation of telematic experiences in different regions of Europe, development and dissemination of best practices guidelines, telematics based solutions for economic and social cohesion, advanced communication and information services, teleworking and dissemination of multimedia technology. Within FP5 INMARK was Project Co-ordinator of FAIRWIS, FAIRSNET, ColdRoad and INNOVANET projects.

As per recent RTD related endeavours, INMARK is Project Co-ordinator of the almost succesfully finished VIKEF - Virtual Information and Knowledge Environment Framework Integrated Project (IST-507173); COLD-TRACE – Cold Chain monitoring and traceability services (eTEN 517403); WISE – Women Integration and Skills for Entrepreneurs (Leonardo – PP149267) and LEKTOR SSA - LEgal Knowledge Transfer acceleratOR for SME clusters and digital business ecosystems (IST-034932). Besides, it is the Spanish representative of the EUREKA eConTec umbrella project.

This specific experience in EU RTD has allowed INMARK to consolidate a robust team of Technicians and Project Managers and gained expertise in performing tasks related to the identification and seizure of opportunities arising from research and technological development outputs, the evaluation of commercial feasibility and, ultimately, the management of entire project life-cycles and their spin-offs. Besides its RTD Project Management skills, INMARK is in a strong position to carry out tasks related to market research and analysis, users requirements, Dissemination and Exploitation of project results.

In order to support the foreseen market research and networking (contacting potential interviewees, handling recruitment for workshops, etc) tasks, INMARK has a well established and specialised human and technological infrastructure:

  • A Telemarketing unit, with 150 teleinterviewers for contacting and CATI (Computer Aided Telephone Interviews)
  • SIRTI (Integrated System for Gathering and Treatment of Information), a system developed by INMARK for conducting telephone surveys
  • Survey Data Processing Centre, with computer equipment and programmes specialised in statistics exploitation of questionnaires and databases (During 2006, INMARK processed some 240.000 questionnaires of 176 different surveys).

DFKI

Founded in 1988, DFKI today is one of the largest non-profit contract research institutes in the field of innovative software technology based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods. DFKI is focusing on the complete cycle of innovation - from world-class basic research and technology development through leading-edge demonstrators and prototypes to product functions and commercialization. Based in Kaiserslautern, Saarbrucken, and Bremen, the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence ranks among the important "Centres of Excellence" worldwide. An important element of DFKI's mission is to move innovations as quickly as possible from the lab into the marketplace. Only by maintaining research projects at the forefront of science DFKI has the strength to meet its technology transfer goals. The key directors of DFKI are Prof. Wolfgang Wahlster (CEO) and Dr. Walter G. Olthoff (CFO). The research and technology development is carried out in the DFKI research labs and at the associated Centre for Human-Machine Interaction (Prof. Dr.-Ing. Detlef Zuhlke)

At DFKI, all work is organized in the form of clearly focused research or development projects with planned deliverables, various milestones, and a duration from several months up to three years. Recently, the circle of DFKI industrial partners including DaimlerChrysler AG, Deutsche Telekom AG, SAP AG, IDS Scheer AG, Bertelsmann AG, and Microsoft Deutschland GmbH, has been expanded by Deutsche Post World Net (DPWN) and BMW AG. Six out of the 30 DAX companies are now DFKI shareholders.

At the DFKI competence centres, there is a broad concentration of technological and technical know-how, and the purpose is the management of important scientific problems from several subject areas, e.g. Semantic Web. The competence centre of the semantic web is a virtual research centre within DFKI that fosters cooperation between DFKI projects and departments on the development and use of Semantic Web and Web3.0 technologies based on XML, RDF, RDF Schema, OWL, rule languages and (semantic) web services. DFKI has long been working in technologies highly relevant to the Semantic Web such as ontologies, semantic metadata, rule systems, and information extraction.

In various projects, the intelligent user interface department of DFKI covers the whole range of interface technology and computer-based presentation techniques to effectively support human decision makers. The department is headed by DFKI’s CEO Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. mult. Wolfgang Wahlster and encompasses around 40 full time researchers and a similar number of student assistants. Besides a lot of EU-, industry-, and governmental-funded projects the department of Intelligent User Interfaces is currently engaged with project supervision and management, system integration and the realisation of a multimodal dialogue component within the leading innovation SmartWeb, which is part of the support programme “IT 2006” by the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research. SmartWeb enables the intuitive access to the Semantic Web and its services through intelligent user interfaces in a mobile multimodal dialogue.

OVUM Europe

Ovum Europe Ltd, a Datamonitor Group Company, is the largest European headquartered advisor on telecommunications, software and IT services with over 200 full time staff. Ovum offers a range of integrated services that includes tailored consultancy, advisory services that give clients direct access to our analysts, and specialist research. Our expertise is based on more than two decades of research conducted globally.

Ovum has a unique insight into global markets through offices in Asia-Pacific (Korea, Australia, Hong Kong, Japan) Europe (London, Paris, Cologne) and North America (Boston, California). Our consultants work with clients to address a range of strategic, regulatory, technology, financial and operational issues. We differentiate ourselves through the depth of our industry experience and the breadth of our research base. We employ structured methodologies and advanced tools and models enabling us to leverage our expertise more efficiently and effectively. Our delivery model is to work closely with our clients through all stages of a project.

We have participated in three FP6 projects, MOCCA, BEACON, a broadband policy research project where we were the coordinator and SEKT, a software and search project.

Intelligent Software Components S.A. (iSOCO)

iSOCO - Intelligent Software Components, S.A. is a private company founded in 1999 as a spin-off of the Spanish Scientific Research Council (CSIC/IIIA) in Barcelona. Currently, iSOCO employs 70 persons in offices in Barcelona, Madrid and Valencia. In order to ensure a proper transfer of the research to the market, iSOCOLab was created in January 2001, as the Research department with three main objectives: maintain the technological level of the company, develop new prototypes to approach the market through new products and ensure the application of new technologies to business processes.

iSOCO is participating in European research projects funded by the European Commission, in cooperation with about 60 technological partners from European universities, research centres and companies. These projects allow iSOCO to anticipate technological progress, think with a three-year perspective and transform knowledge into business opportunities.

iSOCO has also participated in a non-EU funded research project called Halo, funded by Vulcan Enterprises: Project Halo is a long-term research and development initiative that aims to develop a "Digital Aristotle" -- an application capable of answering novel questions and solving advanced problems in a wide range of scientific disciplines. Also iSOCO provides innovative solutions based on Semantic Web technologies to companies and organizations such as: Volkswagen, Vodafone, public administration in Spain, Banks, etc.

In most of the R&D projects iSOCO was in the core team dealing with commercial and research exploitation of project results. iSOCO has experience in several exploitation approaches for R&D projects and consortia:

  • Business plan creation and development (DIP, SEKT, SUPER, NeOn)
  • Dissemination and training activities beyond project duration (SWWS, IBROW, Ontogrid
  • Building and marketing software solutions (Esperonto, DIP, SEKT)
  • Clustering partners and results into post-project research collaboration (SEKT, HOPS, DIP)
  • Spin-off creation (SEKT)

 

Now, individually, iSOCO is one of the leading technology innovation companies in Spain and in Europe marketing research results based on STE. The collaboration network acquired from the research consortia across the whole world allows iSOCO to design and construct technological solutions combining experiences from all main players of the STE community.

 

TELEFONICA I+D

Telefónica, S.AU. is the world's leading telecom operator in Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking countries, where it has more than 100 million customers. It is Spain's top multinational in market capitalisation and one of the world's biggest telecom companies, and employs over 120.000 persons. The companies in the Telefónica group provide a complete range of communications services which includes fixed telephony, mobile telephony, data transmission and added-value services, business services, internet access, etc.

Telefónica I+D is a 100% subsidiary of Telefónica S.A. Telefónica I+D was formed in 1988 in order to contribute to the technological innovation of the parent company, by performing research and development activities. Over the last few years, the line of work of Telefónica I+D has evolved to conform to the objective of becoming a services creation lab. This objective is driven by the emergence of interactive multimedia services which are increasingly becoming a major force in the telecommunications market. Telefónica I+D employs over 1.000 persons. More than 85% of them hold a University degree.

Telefónica I+D has participated in numerous European projects: eight RACE I, eighteen RACE II, IST, IAP, seven ESPRIT II, four ESPRIT III, and several TEN-IBS, TEN-ISDN, CTS, COST, BRITE, IST, eContent, IAP, Ten-Telecom, EURESCOM. Just in the FP6, TELEFONICA is currently the first leading company across Europe, with participation in more than 70 projects. Moreover Telefónica is an active member of the NEM ETP initiative. Telefonica is part of the NEM management bodies contributing actively to NEM Technology Platform definition and future steps. Telefónica I+D is also the coordinator of two NEM working groups, the Financial Working Group and the NEM Label one.