Last week in Brussels took place the Galileo Application Days, a successful event that gathered over 900 professionals from the GNSS technology sector and related European politics and administrative decision makers.

This event seamlessly mixed three days of conferences and networking, 2,000 sq meters of outdoor application demonstrations and the kick-off of the European Satellite Navigation Competition (Galileo Masters ).

“The goal of Galileo Application Days is simple – to not only talk about the range of cutting edge applications being developed in Europe, but to show them,” said Pedro Pedreira, Executive Director of the European GNSS Supervisory Authority. “Preparing for Galileo requires both establishing the infrastructure in space and preparing for it on the ground, through fostering the development of new products and services that harness the many benefits offered by increasingly more accurate and reliable location and timing information.”

The conference started with a roundtable of GNSS leaders that included Peter Beaumont, Marketing Director Enterprise EMEA at NAVTEQ; Ted Chang, Vice President, Quanta Research Institute, Quanta Computer; Kanwar Chadha, Chief Marketing Officer at CSR and Founder at SIRF; Serge Lebourg, Department Head, Falcon avionics at Dassault Aviation; Ralf Nejedl, CEO, T-Systems Belgium and Filippo Sesia, Director of Product Research at Centro Ricerche Fiat. GPS Business News Editor Ludovic Privat moderated the panel.

The two following days were dedicated to conferences and roundtables focusing on vertical sectors benefiting from GNSS technologies: Leisure and tourism, social and public services, aviation, road and high precision.

In parallel to the conferences, 32 start-up companies and European research projects demonstrated their innovative work, from a GPS-enabled mower to unmanned helicopters, weather forecast to multimodal transportation and Alzheimer patient recovery to pollution monitoring (download the full list here ).

The event was organized by the European GNSS Supervisory Authority (GSA), and the Application Centre for Satellite Navigation in Oberpfaffenhofen (the ‘Galileo Masters’), and sponsored by the European Space Agency (ESA) Technology Transfer Programme.