The Netherlands will soon have its first FIWARE Lab node. This was announced by a consortium of 5 companies (Civity, Deloitte, Elba-Rec, Onetrail and Xcellent), supported by the Economic Board Utrecht. This initiative makes the Netherlands walk in the footsteps of European countries such as Germany, France, Italy and Spain as well as Mexico.

First-class Open Data source of the Netherlands

FIWARE Lab NL will be available and connected to other FIWARE Lab nodes in September 2015. The node will enable developers to freely use standard building tools. "Because FIWARE Lab NL is also focusing on open data and dynamic context information describing the state of the city (e.g., location of buses) through FIWARE standard APIs, it will become the best open data source for developers in the Netherlands", said Arjen Hof, Managing Director of Civity. This combination of Open Data/APIs and building tools will be reusable and will significantly accelerate the development of applications.

Unique Physical meetings, unique in Europe

Besides virtual events, FIWARE Lab NL also organise physical meeting sessions in cooperation with several Startup Centers. This is a unique opportunity for Startups to get familiar with FIWARE and its community members. "At those meetings, people share knowledge, work together on great ideas, and potential customers, such as cities, meet developers in an innovation-focused atmosphere", explained Jeroen Moonen, General Manager of Onetrail. FIWARE Lab NL also embraces programmes from the Economic Board Utrecht on ‘Green’, ‘Smart’ and ‘Health’ and aims to connect to other Smart City programmes in the Netherlands to promote FIWARE and FIWARE Lab NL to (local) developers and municipalities.

Smart Cities

A first group of of cities and companies have stated their interest in using FIWARE Lab NL. Actually, the cities of Amersfoort and Utrecht have expressed their clear intentions to have FIWARE applications developed relying on resources available through FIWARE Lab NL. This will pave the way for these municipalities to join the Open and Agile Smart Cities (OASC) initiative, recently launched (last March), which gathers together cities committed to adopt a common set of de facto standards for Smart Cities. It is very likely that other cities will follow soon. "FIWARE Lab NL does not only facilitate, but also wants to play a match making role between entrepreneurs and organisations like cities with their respective projects", said Tom Willebrandts, Innovation Manager for the City of Amersfoort.

20 million Euros in investment

Applications developed in FIWARE Lab NL will be easy to reuse and made scalable on a European level. This leads to new jobs and (business) opportunities for companies in the Utrecht region. These opportunities should eventually lead to an economic spin-off of roughly 1,500 jobs and investments of 20 million euros until 2020. That’s why organizations supporting the operation of the FIWARE Lab NL are also planning to provide a commercial FIWARE Cloud.

Municipalities, companies, developers, and other interested parties will find more information about FIWARE Lab NL at www.fiware-lab.nl. That is also the place to sign in for more information about the upcoming opening of the lab in September 2015.

Note

For more information, please contact Arjan Ankerman at info@fiware-lab.nl or +31 (0)33-8700 100.