One of our partner companies, Sense Tecnic Systems Inc, was recently invited to participate in a Canadian trade mission to Europe representing Canada’s Smart City technology companies.

The trade mission, involving 15 Canadian companies first visited the UK for a 1 day smart city workshop. This was well attended by UK companies and innovation groups including:

  • Future Cities Catapult: UK’s innovation hub for Smart Cities: video link, seek to 15 minutes in
  • Bristol is Open: Smart City platform and projects from Bristol
  • Peterborough DNA: Mid sized UK city developing a smart city strategy
  • HyperCat consortium: Smart City & IoT interoperability standard (Urban Opus supports HyperCat)

From there the mission flew to Stockholm where the Euopean Eureka network was hosting a 2 day smart city event as part of it’s yearly innovation conference. For those of you not familiar with the Eureka program, it is an industry driven innovation network that aims to bring together small and large european companies. Recently Eureka has reached out to non-european countries and Canada has joined in 2014. Eureka projects are funded partly by companies and partly by national innovation bodies. In Canada, funding is provided by NRC-IRAP, and is aimed at helping Canadian companies, particularly SMEs, build technical and business partnerships with European companies. More information on Eureka for Canadian companies can be found HERE

Over 500 companies and 1200 delegates attended the Eureka innovation week, which was a mix of keynotes, project presentations, panel sessions as well as several matchmaking events where copanies discuss potential project ideas and seek partners.

Some highlights included:

Winn Nielsen Head of City Data at the City of Copenhagen (video link) and Sara Mazur Head of Ericsson research (video link), gave two different perspectives on how we can shape the future of the smart cities with the help of innovative technology and the Internet of Things.

The participants also had the chance to visit 50 exhibitors with innovative projects from the different programs within the EUREKA Network and the co-organisers.

 

Study visits in Smart Cities

Participants also had the opportunity to visit and try out self-driving buses at Ericsson Studios in Kista, see how a smart city is emerging in Stockholm Royal Seaport and in the City of Stockholm’s project – Grow Smarter.

Sense Tecnic, who build a Smart City platform CityHub, actually provide the Urban Opus data hub used by many of our projects. They have recently developed a rapid prototyping tool (FRED), based on IBM’s visual programming language Node-RED, which they have been using to build smart city and IoT applications.