In less than two weeks we will be heading to CEBIT from June 11th to 15th in Hanover, Germany. CEBIT, the “Europe’s Business Festival for Innovation and Digitisation”, returns in 2018 with an updated concept that focusses on three areas: business, leads and ideas.

FIWARE will be attending the event along with UNITY Consulting & Innovation from Paderborn, Germany, and Nortal, Estonia’s biggest IoT company. We will be exhibiting at a 350 sq m kommune.digital stand, a marketplace devoted to exchanges about the digital future of communities and cities in Germany. During the event, the FIWARE Foundation will present FIWARE as the operating system for Smart Cities. It will address how it, as an open source platform, is transforming cities across the globe into engines of growth. Come and meet us in Hall 14, Stand L35.

CEBIT 2018 is geared up to be its best edition to date. According to Deutsche Messe Managing Board member, Oliver Frese, the event is set to be “a business festival for innovation and digitization, […] an energizing and captivating festival of bright ideas for the digital future.”

Digitization is the innovative power behind the transformation of the way we engage with technology at work, at home and in our cities. “Only CEBIT, with its long history and deep roots in the digital economy, has the credentials and capability needed to draw these various strands together into a cohesive, high-impact package.”

CEBIT is proposing a digitization dialogue, sharing know-how, inspiration, conversation and networking. “The new CEBIT will pick up on all the big digitization topics and present them in all their many facets,” Frese said. Themes will include AI, IoT, robotics, big data, cloud computing, security and will go across sectors, with a mandatory stop in the Smart Cities area.

To truly become ‘smart’, a city must transform itself into an ICT enabler for well-being, economic growth and innovation. By adopting common standards and information models, cities can achieve this transformation with minimum impact. Building an ecosystem where they can connect and collaborate is an important step towards building a sustainable Digital Single Market for Smart Cities. This enables the creation of interoperable and portable solutions that can be adapted and replicated for the needs of each city.

The FIWARE open source platform is becoming the “de facto” standard adopted by cities and entrepreneurs. Its open source nature allows platform providers to emerge faster in the market. This activates the kind of competition and freedom of choice that are essential for innovation and growth.

Open Platform Models encourage interaction, match application builders with data providers, and facilitate new economic opportunity. Helping app makers and businesses to consume the data hosted on their platform will play a key role in successfully enabling new economic growth. Cities must therefore encourage entrepreneurs to create innovative services and make use of data sources. This will enable the economy of data to emerge.

FIWARE Foundation CEO, Ulrich Ahle, will be also presenting “FIWARE: the open source platform for our smart digital future” on Wednesday, June 13th from 4:30PM to 5PM at kommune.digital Forum. Ulrich Ahle will hold his speech right after our partners from UNITY and city of Paderborn (4PM – 4:30PM). In turn, his speech will be followed by the Nortal representatives’ presentation (5PM – 5:30PM).