Wednesday, August 09, 2017

Connected bikes shed new light on the smart city

Just over a year ago I wrote about See.Sensea Northern Ireland-based start-up making and selling smart connected bicycle lights. The lights were pretty cool in themselves (the cyclists in my family tried one) but the really clever thing was the way in which the company was planning to make use of the data from sensors in the lights, recognising that it was now in the urban data business.

I’m pleased to be able to say that the company is still progressing along this track. This week it announced two new trials with smart city programmes – one in Dublin, where it’s one of four smart cycling pilots rolled out in the run-up to the city’s hosting the global cycling congress Velo City in 2019, and one in Manchester, where the data is being delivered to the CityVerve smart city hub so that it can be accessed and exploited by the wider community of developers.

Both pilots involve the cities’ cycling communities, and both offer the See.Sense ICON light at a highly subsidised price in return for users agreeing to share their sensor data.

These are still early days. Various use cases are being discussed (including one of my favourites, using the lights to gather crowdsourced data on surface quality) but none have been definitively adopted. There’s no commercial model either, so no sign of how See.Sense might move towards a business that isn’t just based on hardware sales. But it’s promising, and a coupe of visible signs that the value of the company’s approach is being recognised more widely.

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