The FIWARE Tech Summit 2017 was an outstanding opportunity to showcase how the initiative is growing day by day, creating more and more impact at worldwide scale. The expansion of the FIWARE community in the US is one of the best examples of this, now entering a new exciting phase with the first public-private projects between ‘Powered by FIWARE’ companies and US public administrations.

Since 2015 FIWARE is an official partner of the Global City Teams Challenge, the Smart City initiative led by the US’ National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). As part of this involvement, the FIWARE Mundus Team has been working to explore and make possible opportunities with relevant stakeholders and communities. For this reason, we launched the FIWARE GCTC Challenge in 2017, an ambitious competition with the goal to replicate top smart solutions based on FIWARE in US cities.

These are the 2 winners of the Challenge that were announced during the FIWARE Summit and will obtain financial support of 25,000€ to achieve their objectives:

• WiseTown: TeamDev -member of the FIWARE Foundation- is partnering with the City of Independence (Oregon) to create an event management system capable of coordinating the city’s workforce for the July 4th Independence Day celebration. WiseTown Situation Room will enable a centralized dashboard to manage city events, connecting cameras, traffic information, social networks and other media that can report issues and manage city operators. This mission-critical pilot is important for the city, which is experiencing a growing issue in managing city events and the amount of data coming from different data streams that affects events management.

• RAY: This solution delivers unique digital services to enable digital accessibility and true inclusiveness for the blind and visually impaired. RAY ensures that any blind person can enjoy a large set of services required for daily activities including interaction, social messaging, audio book reading and finding their way around. The company has signed an agreement with ‘Innovation Hartford’ -the commercial development organization of the state of Connecticut- to implement a telephony support center in the City of Hartford, which will be operated by visually impaired people that will support the community over the phone and using remote-support technologies.

These projects will participate at the 2018 kick-off conference of GCTC next February 6-8 in Washington DC. This and more news will follow, so stay tuned!

Guest post by Jose Gonzalez (Interinnov / FIWARE Mundus)

Header picture by Luca Bravo on Unsplash