From 17 to 19 November 2015, I was in Barcelona to take part in the largest event dedicated to smart cities Smart City Expo World Congress and to represent the EC’s Future Internet Public-Private Partnership Programme (FI-PPP) activities, and its main outcome FIWARE.  I had the opportunity to see how Europe’s competitiveness will rapidly advance through innovative Future Internet technologies. And, with these great new partnerships, it looks promising:

Firstly, FIWARE and the European Data Portal  will collaborate to bring free data to the growing open community of thousands of FIWARE developers, startups and new users in Europe and world-wide. This open more than 250,000 datasets available through a multilingual interface of the European Data Portal come from public organisations in the EU, and it is available for use and reuse for commercial or non-commercial purposes.

Secondly, FIWARE and TM Forum, the global industry association for digital business, have joined forces to speed up the development of new smart city applications. This partnership will enable more efficient management of municipal services in areas such as mobility, water, waste, energy and environmental management, and will also pave the way for the development of smart applications by third parties. Together with cities that joined the global Open & Agile Smart Cities (OASC) this will boost the creation of sustainable smart city ecosystems. OASC is a city-driven initiative which creates a global smart city market based on simple and open standards.  New cities have joined from England, Croatia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as from existing OASC country networks, bringing the total to 75 cities from 15 countries. Porto joined OASC earlier this year and is one of the first   cities to publish real-time open data based on FIWARE. Supported by the local SME Ubiwhere, Porto has now a network of mobile and fixed sensors across the urban region and infrastructure supporting different apps and services. The Ubiwhere’s partnership with the Porto Water Supply Company collects data from more than 20,000 sensors allowing monitoring and advising for water consumption.

Thirdly, The Things Network and FIWARE Lab NL have recently announced the creation of an open Internet-of-Things-platform. The Things Network is a Dutch crowd initiative that launched an open source LoRa-netwerk in Amsterdam (NL) in August. It also gathers a growing community in 36 nations and more than 130 cities worldwide. The two initiatives will create together an open IoT platform so developers will have meaningful sensor data to work with in the FIWARE Lab to create new solutions for smart cities, healthcare, agrifood and more. This initiative is supported by the Ministry of Infrastructure and the cities Amersfoort, Eindhoven, Enschede, Rotterdam and Utrecht, all cities that joined OASC.

Last but not least, FIWARE partners with the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) for the Global City Teams Challenge 2016 program (GCTC2016). Connecting communities and businesses by using the Internet of the Things (IoT) will improve resource management and quality of life. Through its participation in GCT2016, FIWARE can also contribute to building and strengthening sustainable innovation ecosystems, leveraging its previous experience in engaging with relevant players at the European and international level.

I am very happy and enthusiastic about all these new collaborations that confirm the interest for open, multi-vendor platform ecosystems. In particular it strengthens FIWARE as an emerging leading example of an open service platform surrounded by an open innovation ecosystem of several thousand developers, attracting numerous cities.

This is a great opportunity for industry to accelerate a competitive European/global market of open platform services, and also a signal to ensure the relevant policy, legal, political and regulatory frameworks are in place.

Know more about FIWARE at www.fiware.org and follow @FIWARE!