The 34th edition of the International Tourism Trade Fair of Madrid (ifema.es) takes place in Madrid from the 30 January to 3 February.

In this framework, APSAT (apsat.eu), Tecnalia (tecnalia.com) and Eurisy co-organised a workshop with the objective of debating the contribution of satellite applications to the tourism sector, both today - in terms of operational, commercial applications - and tomorrow, in terms of the most innovative applications in the making.

The event has featured experience sharing by both tourism professionals who already use operational applications on the one hand, and application developpers on the other hand.

Eurisy has contribute to the programme of this conference organised by EUROGI (European Umbrella Organisation for Geographic Information) by inviting Shannon Development -- an end-user of a geographic information and satellite navigation for an on-line and mobile tourism application -- share their experience, from a value-for-money and implementation process point of view.

This has brought forward the point of view of local authorities as an input to the main aim of the conference, which was to identify opportunities arising from the application of emerging geospatial data, services and technologies. Promoting job creation, achieving more efficient and effective public sector policy making and service delivery, as well as the creation of a more informed public, were all areas of focus.

The conference “SMEs and entrepreneurs: boosting business using satellite applications", gathered around 80 participants in Bratislava, Slovakia last 23 May.

Keynotes provided insights into the challenges SMEs are facing both in Europe, and specifically in Slovakia. Among these: rude competition, fragmentation of economic activities (many SMEs have 9 staff and less), difficulties for SMEs to access public procurement, public funds and capital, sluggish development of the knowledge-intensive service sector and of difficulties to access international markets.

The relatively pessimistic outlook on a macroeconomic level was however brightened up with many examples of SME success stories - almost half of which were from Slovakia, which took up satellite services improve and develop their business.