After the first solar bench designed by Ivan Mrvoš, 21-year-old entrepreneur from Solin, was installed in front of the University of Zagreb building in June 2016, two additional “smart” benches were added to Radnički dol, near Britanski trg last night.
As Dalmatinski portal reported on March 21 2017, the plan is to add 15 more benches around the city, and create an interactive map of their locations afterwards.
“18 people have charged their mobile devices on the benches in the first couple of hours, so we’re satisfied with the reactions so far.” Ivan said.
The benches, called Steora, are assembled in Klis, near Split.
This young entrepreneur’s success story has been followed by the Croatian readers with pride for over a year now.
As TCN reported in 2016, Ivan’s benches are the first of their kind in Europe: the smart bench allows simultaneous charging of four mobile phones or tablets, it has a hotspot to connect to the Internet, sensors for monitoring air quality and at night is serves as a public lighting system.
His company, Include, launched its first crowdfunding campaign via Funderbeam SEE platform in late February 2017, Netokracija reports. The aim of the campaign was to raise €400,000 for business development and the investors included people from Croatia, but also other interested parties from all over the world. See the campaign on Funderbeam here.
Ivan stated that he decided to launch a crowdfunding campaign because he wants to continue creating and assembling benches in Croatia. 17 young people, mostly local experts from Split area, are currently employed at Include. Last year, 132 benches were bought by different countries around the world, including Bosnia and Herzegovina, Australia, Switzerland, the Czech Republic, Sweden, but also the USA and Australia.
Visit Include’s website here.
