Geospatial Innovation Competition 2025

CloudFerro Cloud Innovation Competition for best geospatial apps

We are pleased to announce the winning proposals admitted to the Development Phase of the Geospatial Competition 2025 organised by CloudFerro.

Thank you very much for your interest in our Geospatial Innovation Competition 2025 and all the valuable entries submitted. Please see below the selected 15 applications admitted to the Development Phase (in alphabetical order):

1. DetectEO
2. FarEarth for SmallSats
3. Hive Mind
4. Monitoring inland water quality in Poland using Python and Sentinel-2 satellite imagery
5. NIMBO – AI-Powered Global Satellite Imagery Platform
6. Oasis Health Index
7. Pollution in Agriculture –Distribution Monitoring and Evaluation
8. PVDetect – Automated Detection of Photovoltaic Installations from Aerial Imagery
9. SatView
10. SEN2BURN (Sentinel-based Burned Area Detection Algorithm)
11. SENSORBITE
12. SpaceFlow.ai
13. Spaceit MCS Deployment into CloudFerro Cloud
14. SynappseAI-W-LeakDetect
15. Traffic Intensity Explorer

Congratulations to all the winners of the Selection Phase and good luck in the Development Phase!

We will contact the authors of the above selected proposals individually by email. If you have any questions, please reach out to us at  [email protected].

What is the Geospatial Competition

CloudFerro has invited all who work with spatial data and would like to create an app that would make a real difference in how we understand, manage, or protect our world, to join Geospatial Innovation Competition 2025 and bring their projects to life with CloudFerro’s cloud computing infrastructure and expert mentoring. The competition is aimed at developers, scientists, startups, and students.

The goal of the competition is to foster an ecosystem of spatial data producers, adopters and end users on CloudFerro Cloud. Participants are encouraged to use the advanced tools, services, and datasets available through CloudFerro Cloud and the CREODIAS platform to showcase their capabilities and contribute to the growth of the Earth observation and spatial data community.

The ideal project is a solution that combines multiple collections of geospatial data, runs on environments hosted by CloudFerro Cloud and uses CloudFerro AI tools to build user-facing interfaces. It clearly outlines what areas it will impact and how and what value it will bring in that area. It identifies and addresses needs of a selected user group (there is no preference towards end user profiles, industry, research and academia, wider society are equally welcome).

For more details, go to Terms and Conditions of the CloudFerro Geospatial Competition.

The schedule of the Competition

The competition is divided into several parts - the Collection of Proposals, the Selection, and the Development. Here are the dates and deadlines for each stage of the competition:

• 25 March 2025 – Competition Announcement
• 25 March – 31 May 2025 – Collection of Proposals
• 1 June 2025 – 22 June 2025 – Selection (Stage 1 and Stage 2)
• 23 June 2025 - Selection Results Announcement
• 23 June – 15 December 2025 – Phase 1 of the Development
• 15 December 2025 – Midterm Check
• 15 December 2025 – 30 June 2026 – Phase 2 of the Development
• 30 June 2026 – Technical Documentation Submission
• 1 July 2026 – 14 July 2026 – Final Review
• 15 July 2026 – 16 July 2026 – Re-evaluation Process
• 17 July 2026 – Project Completion, Final Results Announcement

Eligibility criteria

All proposals received in response to the Competition announcement, have been checked to the following items:

1. Type of Participant. The participants can be:
   1. SMEs (individual SMEs and/or consortia of SMEs)
   2. Universities, faculties and research institutes
   3. NGOs
   4. Individuals (ages older than 18 years old)
2. English-language. English is the official language for the open call. The proposal must be in English in all its mandatory parts in order to be eligible. If the mandatory parts of the proposal are in any other language, the proposal shall not be eligible. 
3. Submission. All proposals shall be submitted via an email, as PDFs. Applications must be submitted by the closing time and date published in the competition. 
4. Conflict of Interest. Participants shall not have any potential conflict of interest with CloudFerro.
5. All required documents. All of the requested documents have to be submitted. 

Evaluation Process

The evaluation is organized into two stages:

• Stage 1: Eligibility evaluation- Proposals are checked for the eligibility with the competition requirements. 
• Stage 2: Proposal evaluation - All eligible proposals will be scored against a set of qualitative criteria.

Stage 1: Eligibility Evaluation

Eligibility Criteria for Evaluation at the Stage 1.

1. Full alignment with the requested type of Participant.
2. All necessary documents are submitted in English.
3. All necessary documents are submitted via email at a designated email address.
4. All necessary documents are submitted with respect to the submission deadline.
5. There is no conflict of interest.
6. Submission is complete (all necessary documents are submitted).

Proposals that do not pass all eligibility checks, will be marked as non-eligible. No further evaluation will be performed. Participants will receive a rejection letter including reasons (1-6) for being marked as non-eligible. No further feedback on the process will be given.

Stage 2: Proposal Evaluation

All eligible proposals will be evaluated by 2 evaluators picked by CloudFerro. The experts will be selected accordingly with the specific characteristics of the project.  Proposals will be evaluated following four main criteria as described below. Each evaluator will assess the application scoring in the range 0 to 5 for each criterion (half point scores may be given) and produce Individual evaluation sheet.

The scoring scale includes:

• 0 - Fail
• 1 - Poor
• 2 - Fair
• 3 - Good
• 4 - Very good
• 5 - Excellent

The final score will be calculated as the average of the individual assessments provided by the evaluators. 

The proposals will be scored against the following criteria:

1. Alignment with CloudFerro's offer
2. Innovation
3. Impact
4. Implementation

The proposal selection will be based on the final score. To be selected, proposals need to receive final score of at least 10. Proposals that with a final score below that threshold will not be considered for prizes. Proposals that receive an average score of 0 (Fail) in any of the individual criterion shall not be considered for prizes. 

Alignment with CloudFerro's offer 

The following services and products will be taken into consideration when evaluating the extent of alignment with CloudFerro's offer:

• CloudFerro Sherlock AI platform
• Data catalogue (STAC)
• Jupyter Notebooks
• VM-as-a-Service
• GPU-as-a-Service
• Kubernetes Magnum

Prizes

Selected proposals will receive attractive prizes that will help make the apps successful! The authors of best proposals will receive a technical support package for developing the applications, covering:

• computing power, storage, and networking tailored to the project’s needs
• personalized mentoring
• hands-on technical support.

Successfully completed projects will receive additional technical support packages for support services for further development or operations.

Terms and Conditions

For more details, deadlines and requirements, please go to Terms and Conditions of the CloudFerro Geospatial Competition.