Developing the city of the future through realistic cases. Future City Challenge provides IoT technologies for developers.

IBM, Digita and Etteplan are organising the first nationwide competition in Finland to design innovative solutions and applications that make everyday life in cities easier. Cities taking part in the competition are Helsinki, Espoo, Vantaa, Tampere, Jyväskylä and Oulu. The challenge is estimated to impact around 2 million citizens in Finland.

The competition is aimed at companies, start-ups and students interested in resolving city challenges.

Top of the range technologies and coaching

The goal of the challenge is to create IoT based solutions using IBM Bluemix and Digita’s LoRaWAN technologies. The solution is hoped to utilize real-time data from the physical world, enriched with existing data.

Digita will provide participants access to Digita’s IoT network that is based on the nationwide LoRaWAN technology, and IBM will offer the IBM Bluemix innovation platform that includes features like the IBM Watson artificial intelligence and IoT platform.

Coaching for the participating teams is organized weekly taking turn in different cities.

Cities strive for creating better life

For the challenge cities of Helsinki, Espoo and Vantaa presented their real-life challenges at Helsinki Loves Developers. The cities and especially Helsinki hoped that, in addition to creating services for cities, participants would also consider the solutions business potential. All the works submitted to Future City Challenge are intended to bring value to the city or citizen. Cities encouraged participants to use cities’ open data and open interfaces.

Helsinki aims to be the most functional city in the world. The challenges Helsinki faces are future services that create urban environment, for example, how to collect relevant data in the urban environment to support city planning and decision making. Second challenge that Helsinki faces in the future is “a functional city creates an advanced everyday life”. In Helsinki, a functional city leads to a forward-looking everyday life. The goal of the city is to be safe and pleasant, smooth, easy and caring – resident- and user-oriented city.

Espoo challenges the participants to think about the city as a service and create well functioning smart services. How to utilise smart services to develop an economically, socially, culturally and ecologically sustainable Espoo? It also strives for better utilization and measurement of existing data. Utilization of real-time data in innovative ways is also important.

Vantaa wants to digitalize the future of the city, with the focus on the inhabitants’ well-being and sense of participation. Vantaa’s challenges are encounters with inhabitants at a digital fogscreen, a dive into a community experience using a transitional databus, creative frenzy with data – which elements in the everyday life move and shake people? Vantaa will organize it’s own jam 13th of November.

The competition will kick off in Espoo on Wednesday 22 November.

Author: Noora Suvanto