A couple of months before the 1st FIWARE Summit, the city of Málaga was the meeting point around sustainable urban communities, and gathered representatives from several companies and institutions that are working towards an innovative and viable model for the smart cities.

There, we had the chance to talk with some of the contributors involved in that process. A company like Adevice plays a substantial role in the advancement of Sevilla as a smart city: while creating an automated monitoring system for the city’s ornamental fountains, Adevice also has provided means to interconnect the already existing infrastructures using their own IoT-ready devices –part of the FIWARE catalogue and operating now also in the Canary Islands.

Taking care of the local and regional ecosystems is a crucial aspect for the smart-development focus: to act knowing the particularities of each community and to engage the nearest actors eases the path to succeed within a global framework for the IoT-enables smart cities.

Maria Virtudes Briz, FIWARE expert, explained us some of the projects that Telefónica is currently running in Santiago de Chile: “We are including data from Transantiago that allows us to geolocalize in real-time the position of each one of the buses moving around the city”. Studying the data flow in each community allows “to understand which the behavior of each one of the citizens is and to give each one of them better tips according to their likings”.

To act locally upon our global strategy is the key mission of the FIWARE iHub Programme. The iHubs are physical meeting points for developers, experts, startups, students and other community members. The programme aims to show the path by example, offering coaching and training, tailored for each one of our contributors.

At the 1st FIWARE Summit, the programme was reviewed: what we have achieved and the challenges ahead. We also had the chance to meet two iHubs that are being particularly successful in pushing the community around and getting it to know and to use FIWARE: Faubourg Numérique in France, and INiTS in Austria.

Another announcement made at the Summit –and advanced at the GreenCities event–, was the creation of the FIWARE Zone, a further development of the iHub focus, with two innovation centers in Malaga and Seville.

This new project aims to reach the whole region and boost its global projection, but starting with the engagement of local innovators. As Antonio Cabello, from the Regional Government Economy and Innovation Office, puts it: “Andalucía Smart 2020 takes up the commitment of the Regional Government (Junta de Andalucía) to drive a smart development model on the forthcoming years”. A commitment that needs “to offer, to cities and municipalities, a model that serves them as a guide to develop their strategic project becoming Smart Cities”.

Juan Marcelo Gaitán, director of the FIWARE Zone, links that vision with the direct empowerment of each person or company contributing to and profiting from FIWARE: “We want to help any entrepreneur developing a solution, an application, a technological project that could be sold to any city that uses a platform compliant with the standard”.
To achieve that “We all must get hands-on with FIWARE, touching the technology, creating urban labs, real physical labs where the integrated technology and the devices that are offering added value to the City are physically there”.

The FIWARE Zone will be officially launched next Tuesday, January 24th. The project will de unfolding over six axes:

• Innovation Centers and Urban Labs, with two centers and three labs at the moment, demoing the solutions and providing laboratories and training equipment, showcasing the IoT-Ready devices and functioning as a testbed, attracting the best Smart City projects.
   
• The Platform perspective, with each center being a FIWARE instance, offering the technology and resources to develop and test pilot projects, and gathering and offering data, integrating it with FI-LAB.
   
• University, offering training, laboratory experimentation and research groups. As Gaitán explains it: “The University has to spread the knowledge around the technology in order to allow the students to join the companies incorporating that knowledge with them and promoting the development of that technology, within the companies”.
   
• Challenge IoT, an open call where developing teams can present and deploy their ideas, awarding the best of them and opening a network comprising the sponsoring companies and institutions, and the startups and entrepreneurs.
   
• Market, offering support and training sessions on the FIWARE technologies, in order to create or to adapt innovative products that are FIWARE compliant, facilitating the access to the commercial resources that we are offering for powered by FIWARE solutions, like the IoT-Ready programme or the recently launched FIWARE Marketplace.

To learn more about FIWARE Zone and the iHubs Programme, stay tuned to our News section, to this blog and to our social networks, and enjoy our latest My FIWARE Story.