I am currently at the Smart City Expo World Congress 2021, and have so far got the following impression:
I was afraid that the exhibition would be smaller than usual due to the pandemic, but it is just as big as before. However, everyone walks around with face masks.
FIWARE have a large stand, where also actors who have built solutions on FIWARE show their services, e.g. Edag’s waste sorting robot.
Something that at least was new for me is that FIWARE have two reference architecures, one for smart cities and one for vertical solutions.
Moreover, it’s a lot about mobility. For example the Swedish company Voi, which collaborates with cities to offer electric bicycles and electric scooters told about their solutions. They also provide training for drivers, and have a ”drunk driving” test before you can drive.
ZF showed an autonomous bus, and very many have parking solutions. You can recognize
almost all the ideas for parking that our ninth graders came up with in our workshops with them.
There is also a lot of talk about smart lampposts, and to finance a replacement to such, partly through the savings by switching to LED, and partly by charging for other services to use the poles as infrastructure, e.g. to rent space for 5G base stations.
I will fill up with more interesting news, if I stumble across some.
/Leif