Start-ups give UK cities a glimpse of digital future
15 February 2016
by Steve Hoare
The UK government’s innovations agency Innovate UK has rewarded four start-up companies with £35,000 each to find digital solutions for UK cities’ Urban Spaces problems.
Crowd Connected won the Urban Spaces Contest to tackle over-crowding on the London Underground, Accelogress will help Birmingham’s drivers find parking spaces, Yello Brick will introduce the concept of ‘Bus Stop Buddies’ and BlockBuilders will assist city planners using MineCraft.
The four young companies pitched a prestigious panel of judges with solutions to specific briefs set by Transport for London (TfL), West Midlands’ public transport delivery body Centro, outdoor advertising company Clear Channel Outdoor and engineering group Atkins.
“This is an accelerating process. TfL will enable us to grow our technology into a new area that would have been much slower without its assistance,” said Crowd Connected founder James Cobb.
Crowd Connected has been in business for about two years building technology that helps event organisers manage crowd congestion. The company has a core algorithm that uses GPS, wifi, Bluetooth beacons and the signals between mobile devices to help operators spot over-crowding and to analyse crowd movement.
As part of Innovate UK’s first Urban Spaces competition, TfL sent out a brief asking for innovative ways of displaying crowd information to the travelling public, centred around carriage-level data.
“This stared out to me as a perfect fit for what we had already done and our roadmap of where we wanted to go,” said Cobb.
The company also emerged triumphant from a Smart Wayfinding challenge posed by the Institute of Sustainability and the London Mayor’s office. That project will look at smart signage around London. It is on course for a trial at the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.
The Urban Spaces project will fit in with TfL’s carriage density project, which aims to give the transport provider a better understanding of crowding on London Underground trains. If all goes well, Crowd Connected will start a three-month trial in autumn 2016.
The same schedule applies to all the other winners including Accelogress, which will trial its ‘save-a-space’ app in Birmingham. Centro posed the problem of solving the problem of commuters missing trains because of car park queues while other car parks remain empty.
“Parking is such a big area of frustration for so many people,” said Accelogress founder Ralf Kernchen. “We hope this will have the added benefit of easing congestion around the city.”
The company is already trialling a very early prototype of its app with another local authority as part of the European Union’s frontierCities programme.
Cities Today will follow the progress of Crowd Connected’s innovative project with Transport for London with regular updates as it emerges from planning to trial and implementation.
