For the deployment of applications for Future Internet, the European Union gave birth to middleware platform FIWARE.
The objective of FIWARE is to facilitate a cost-effective creation and delivery of Future Internet applications and services in a variety of areas, including smart cities, sustainable transport, logistics, renewable energy, and environmental sustainability.
Although born in Europe, the open community FIWARE platform has been promoting international markets in the last years.
Headquartered in Hamburg, Smart Cities Labhas worked hard to build a value driven organization with laser focus on FIWARE technologies that is the need for the day, today and tomorrow.
Smart Cities Lab that has been assembling and offering an iHUB since 2015, was originated as a Think Tank in 2013. Supporting 96 teams with 378 entrepreneurs in the acceleration phase, Smart Cities Lab participated in the uptake of FIWARE in Germany and in several other North European countries.
The company has been building their FIWARE network also in various parts of the US and Canada.
With an aim to ensure seamless digital connectivity in India, Smart Cities Lab laid its foundation in India. Having labs in Mumbai and Jabalpur, Smart Cities Lab Indiais a collaborative initiative aiming for development, delivery and export of smart ICT and mobile based services and products in the areas like Smart Cities, e-Health, Energy & Environment, Agrifood and Mobility & Logistics.
Smart Cities Lab India is actively promoting FIWARE technologies and cooperation of Indian companies, universities and clusters with relevant global counterparts.
Formingthis world class FIWARE development organization with a goal to facilitate the close collaboration between the Labs and other partners in different geographies, is not one person's job. The organization is a brainchild of Olaf-Gerd Gemein and Rahul Tomar.
Bringing over thirty years of hands-on experience within diverse markets across Europe, North & South America, Asia and Canada, Olaf-Gerd Gemein CEO & Co-Founder of Smart Cities Lab,has successfully supported 100+ projects in the ICT sector.
His contributions revolved mostly around accelerating startup and innovation clusters, building networks, products and services from ground up, facilitating and deploying go-to-market strategies.
Smart Cities Lab's CTO & Co-FounderRahul Tomar, has extensive experience in IT project management, with focused expertise in construction engineering and software applications. Gemein and Tomarhave led a significant transformation, further consolidating Smart Cities Lab's position as a global leader.
STARTUP CITY: Tell ussomething about the unique services of Smart Cities Lab?
Smart Cities Lab: We offer mainly two kind of services. First, we are a knowledge partner for Smart Cities, Clusters, Government, Corporates. Smart Cities Lab India, the first of its kind in Asia, is building an open source community based on the FIWARE and OpenStack technology and platform for developing new and innovative solutions for making cities smart.
Today, the latest technologies are leading us into a new digital revolution resulting in generating new context aware applications that will be hosted in the Cloud, connected to the Internet of Things (IoT) and ability to manage or analyse data on large scales never envisaged before.
Cities are striving to earn a spot into this global and competitive market and must quickly get on board this train to survive. This is where FIWARE open source software platform can help them by easing their transitions to a innovative businesses and solutions.
FIWARE will help cities to build and manage innovative apps and services by making complex processes simple, cost effective, high quality and secure.
All of the FIWARE technology are already available and ready to use via Smart Cities Lab India, the free of charge experimental environment, where developers and web entrepreneurs can find the means to build their projects and test applications with real data and real users.
In the past, with open source everyone has their doubt of having "insecure" data. It is a goal of Smart Cities Lab India to demonstrate this concern is not warranted. These days, open source software is regulatory compliant and ready for enterprises and cities.
Moreover, there are other major benefits with open source and among them one important is open source avoids single vendor proprietary lock-in. Today, there are many great analytics, services and heavy products that are built on top of open source platforms and widely used in major cities and industries.
Why we should talk about FIWARE as a platform ? Why it is worth time to investigate in FIWARE ?
From the technological perspective it is primarilytechnology focused. Platform means somehow a catalogue, an instance where you can deploy, an repository, a set of components, a development kit.
There is much out there which feels and look like the components and API´s provided by FIWARE – why they should investigate, why they should try?
From the Business perspective, a platform is a club, where stakeholders meet to collaborate, potentially platforms organized as brokers providing value to multiple sides.
FIWARE had started as public-private partnership, developing first a feasible architecture and technology, aiming to find a business model. So, why to join the club? Where is the business?
Having said that, we sadly experienced at the beginning, that potential interested parties don't got it on the first shot – they struggled, even if they try hard. FIWARE is not a product, there is no prize tag. It´s "something" virtual, and not yet widely established.
However, today, it is tested and slightly used in many domains, across 37 countries, now, after years of struggle, the concept have became reality.
We are a knowledge partner for Smart Cities, Clusters, Government, Corporates. Smart Cities Lab India, the first of its kind in Asia, is building an open source community based on the FIWARE and OpenStack technology and platform for developing new and innovative solutions for making cities smart.
Today, the latest technologies are leading us into a new digital revolution resulting in generating new context aware applications that will be hosted in the Cloud, connected to the Internet of Things (IoT) and ability to manage or analyse data on large scales never envisaged before.
Cities are striving to earn a spot into this global and competitive market and must quickly get on board this train to survive. This is where FIWARE open source software platform can help them by easing their transitions to a innovative businesses and solutions.
FIWARE will help cities to build and manage innovative apps and services by making complex processes simple, cost effective, high quality and secure.
All of the FIWARE technology are already available and ready to use via Smart Cities Lab India, the free of charge experimental environment, where developers and web entrepreneurs can find the means to build their projects and test applications with real data and real users.
In the past, with open source everyone has their doubt of having "insecure" data. It is a goal of Smart Cities Lab India to demonstrate this concern is not warranted. These days, open source software is regulatory compliant and ready for enterprises and cities.
Moreover, there are other major benefits with open source and among them one important is open source avoids single vendor proprietary lock-in. Today, there are many great analytics, services and heavy products that are built on top of open source platforms and widely used in major cities and industries.
How does Smart Cities Lab build a successful customer base in India?
Smart Cities Lab India, in collaboration with its network and infrastructure partners, has developed a huge ecosystem aiming to accelerate the innovative ideas of citizens.
How? First, the Smart Cities Lab India offers the infrastructure resources that entrepreneurs and web-developers need to build their solutions based ion the requirements of the actual specific 100 Smart Cities Initiative.
They can deploy these solutions or services to one or more nodes within Smart Cities Lab India or existing local infrastructure (if any), and even it is possible to create their private cloud depending on the resources they need.
Entrepreneurs are not alone whilst our experts will help them to connect, adapt or migrate their service and solutions to the platform and train them how to get most out of it.
Then each Smart Cities Lab node has access to business experts and mentors. Entrepreneurs need real user feedback to validate their ideas and make decisions. Smart Cities Lab India opens the door to communities of testers and even early adopters.
As the Lab serves multiple stakeholders, the customer base acquisition is foremost build on network effects and word of mouth propaganda, and a bit on social media awareness.
Tell us about competition. What are your strengths both corporately and culturally compared to these competitors?
Today, there are hundreds of solutions for various aspects of smart cities, and the big industry offer a set of solutions for the needs. However, there is no competitor to our specific offer, as we provide a fully open accessible platform and repository of solutions, which is based on Open Stack and FIWARE.
How does Smart Cities Lab intend to help in the Actualization of the 100 Smart Cities initiative in India?
Smart Cities Lab is inclined to making life easier for cities, citizens and everyone through an ecosystem in which we all can develop citizen-centered sustainable solutions. These solutions include
make available the much needed technical support that would integrate and/or replace the old-fashioned ICT solutions currently deployed in silos;
provide an open technical environment that would encourage further innovation in city stakeholder clusters, and
put the citizen first – by providing systems, enabling environments and citizen-oriented services, while supporting administration processes in city governments.
For example, imagine, if the applications are unified accessing data bridging cross-departments; having platforms that can be likened to comment-based systems that allow city hall personnel, utilities or subcontractors to interact and exchange information directly with citizens and staff alike. That's only one example way multiple stakeholders would benefit from the Lab.
What's your plan in this year?
Heading to 2017, we are on the run to join forces with several more communities, in order to facilitate the close collaboration between the Labs and our other partners, within public-private partnerships in Delhi, Pune, Jabalpur, Jaipur, Ahmadabad, Bengaluru and Bhubaneswar, while they keep advancing in the US. Recently, westarted to negotiate several collaborations with stakeholders in other countries in Asia.
In this year, we are going to apply for some more national and internationals funds, but also expect first revenues from our implemented solutions.
Anyway, we appreciate also funding from CSR programs and looking forward to co-create several initiatives with Indian Industry Partnerships.However, we expect that we can expand in more geographical markets by end of 2017.
Follow us on Google News