Pioneers Festival: Connecting the Old With the New Economy - Konica Minolta Investing $10M in Startups, Cisco's First European Residents and A1 Start Up Campus

VIENNA, Austria, October 29, 2014 /PRNewswire/ --

Pioneers - host of currently running and internationally renowned Pioneers Festival in Vienna - is all about entrepreneurship and future technologies. Therefore, Pioneers acts as an innovation agency, connector and enhancer between innovative startups and established corporations as well. Some of the results were now presented on Oct 29, the first day of the Festival in Vienna.

Global Partner Cisco introduced the first cohort of European Entrepreneurs in Residence, sourced in collaboration with Pioneers. The residents supported for six month are Big Data and analytics startups Dataiku, MammothDB, Metat Innovations, Smart City startups Graphmasters, ICE Gateway and IoT/Cloud startup Flatout.

Konica Minolta is for the third time global Partner of Pioneers Festival. New on board is one of the four Konica Minolta's Business Innovation Centres (BIC), which has been established in 2014. Under this year's motto "Innovation and the power of many", the BIC's approach is to involve the community, namely start-ups, in co-innovation. To emphasise this future model, the BIC Europe today announced its investment sum of over 10 million euros in start-up funding over the next two to three years.

Last but not least, A1 Telekom Austria not only opened their headquarters on the Mentor Day (Oct 27), where the invited Pioneers Challenge startups have received final mentoring for the event. Furthermore A1 CEO, Hannes Ametsreiter, gave some background information about their Start Up Initiative and the A1 Start Up Campus. The coworking space will be launched later this year and will be future home for selected startups in Vienna.

For more information please visit: http://pioneers.io

Contact info:
Eike Lucas
eike@pioneers.io
P: +43-676-948-63-62