On Tuesday, 10 April 2018, the Triangulum project partners attended an iCity tender event at Strijp-S in Eindhoven, Netherlands, where the winning projects presented their innovative ideas. Together with the municipality of Eindhoven, TU/e and VolkerWessels were looking for the best ideas to stimulate the smart city ecosystem and to thus create new smart city services and products.

(Picture: Steinbeis-Europa-Zentrum)

Out of 63 applications, eight projects stood out, receiving financial support of overall 280k. As Roger Boersma of iCity Smart Monitoring says, “funding speeds up the process of innovation”. And he is right! So let’s see who some of the final participants were and how they are planning to change the future of Eindhoven, and maybe the world:

• Abby is a sustainable smart mobility solution, offering e-bikes with integrated solar cells. It started as an interdisciplinary project at TU/e and has now become an innovative start-up that strives to improve urban mobility and bike sharing options in Eindhoven.
• ViNotion is an intelligent video analysis system whose goal it is to “make surveillance smart”. In case of a car accident, data from security cameras will be able to deliver information about the involved vehicles without harming privacy issues (by excluding license plate information). ViSense MobilityDynamics is thus able to provide insight into complex traffic scenarios by analysing the behaviour of pedestrians, cyclists, motorized vehicles and other traffic participants. Ideally, dangerous traffic situations may thus be recognized before the crash!
• BitSensor is an internet security start up offering protection against unwanted hacking attacks in real-time. With their help, companies are able to realize that they have been hacked before it is too late.
• 5D solutions offers to green your walls! With innovative and modular plant panels, 5D solutions uses a special strawberry plant with integrated water sensors to turn buildings into self-regulating “smart grids”.

(Picture: Steinbeis-Europa-Zentrum)

The evening was an event full of smart people, innovative solutions and future-oriented ideas. It gave us an insight into what is possible and how life in cities can be improved in the future. Congratulations once more to the winners of the iCity tender and thank you for such an interesting and informative event!