FIWARE attended CEBIT 2018, Europe’s Business Festival for Innovation and Digitization, from June 11th to 15th in Hanover, Germany. We were joined at the kommune.digital stand by UNITY Consulting & Innovation, the leading Management Consultancy for Digitalization from Paderborn, Germany, and Nortal, Estonia’s biggest IoT company.
FIWARE as the Operating System for Smart Cities
The FIWARE Foundation presented how FIWARE, as an open source platform, is transforming cities across the globe into engines of growth. Its open source nature allows platform providers to emerge faster in the market, activating the kind of competition and freedom of choice that are essential for innovation and growth.
- Avoid getting locked-in to particular platform providers.
- Support to the implementation of replaceable Smart City solutions.
- Choose who will operate your applications and host your data. Be part of a market for cities large enough to attract investment by a larger community of developers and entrepreneurs thus fostering innovation, economy growth and creation of jobs.
- Develop and test Smart city applications in one city that can be ported and adapted to other cities, which means scale opportunities for developers and lower costs for cities.
Digital City Paderborn
In his interview at kommune.digital, FIWARE Foundation CEO, Ulrich Ahle, spoke about the “Digitale Stadt Paderborn” project. The German city took part in the “Digitale Stadt” contest, a joint initiative of the Bitkom Digital Association and the German Association of Towns and Municipalities. The aim: Creating a digital model city with international appeal.
The City of Paderborn took home the second prize. Mr. Ahle highlighted that the city benefited from a big support network, which helped it to establish an effective digital strategy. The project, still in its early stages, will be using the FIWARE open source platform. Nortal is bringing in best practices from Estonia, which is Europe’s leading country in digital governance. In addition, Unity will support as a consultant for digital transformation.
Why Open Source?
To the questions: “Why digitise? Why open source?” Mr. Ahle responded that it improves and simplifies the lives of citizens. “We have many possibilities, Smart Parking for example. When I talk about Context Information, I could, in this case, refer to whether or not a parking spot is taken. We now have technologies that work via sensors or image recognition software to detect if a parking spot is occupied or not. This information is then transferred to the FIWARE Platform, and from there to the navigation system. Instead of being taken to my destination, I can be taken to a free parking spot closest to my final destination.”
He went on to highlight its potential, stating that when considering, for instance, that 30% of Stuttgart’s inner city traffic is looking for parking places, this could make not only the lives of citizens much easier, but also reduce pollution.
Human-Robot Society Platform
Mr. Ahle stopped by the TIS Inc. Booth to personally welcome them to the FIWARE Foundation. TIS recently joined the Foundation as a Gold Member.
The team attended CEBIT to present, amongst other things, their Human-Robot Society Platform.
The Platform, which is based on FIWARE technologies, promotes a smart society. One where we can coexist and collaborate with heterogeneous robots, sensors and open data in various fields. TIS extends FIWARE as the Cloud Native and Robot platform in order to create functions such as Robot Management, API Gateway, Load Balancer and Security.
Relive the Highlights
