Itron Invites Innovators to Participate in Smart City Challenge

LIBERTY LAKE, Wash. — Nov. 12, 2018 — Itron, Inc. (NASDAQ: ITRI) is calling for hardware and software vendors to submit their products and solutions to the inaugural Itron Smart City Challenge. IoT solution providers will compete for the chance to work with leading smart cities, including Glasgow and the City of London, to deploy breakthrough solutions. Applications are due by Jan. 4, 2019.
Participants are invited to develop solutions to address challenges defined by the participating cities.

• Glasgow: Improve travel choices and experience during events in the city while promoting the overall city center offer
  The City of Glasgow is one of the world’s top sporting cities and a major destination for conferences and concerts. Many thousands of people come to the city on a regular basis to experience its year-round calendar of events. However, this brings significant challenges in getting people safely and conveniently around the city to their location. It also impacts residents and particularly, the public transport system. In order to maintain its position as a top destination and attract even more visitors, Glasgow is seeking solutions to safely and efficiently manage the movements of large influxes of people in order to ensure that they have a positive experience.  
• London: Enhance safety along the River Thames in central London
  The City of London Corporation would like to find new ways to improve river safety through technology to meet the City’s safety and public health priorities. Due to the life-threatening nature of river entries, the City Corporation is seeking solutions that accelerate emergency response times and that protect citizens by ensuring the availability of safety equipment when it is needed.

Utilizing Itron’s standards-based developer tools, technology providers are invited to integrate their solutions with Itron’s IoT platform to tackle any of these key business and societal challenges. Qualified participants will receive free hardware development kits and engineering support to accelerate the development of Wi-SUN-based solutions. By taking advantage of the Wi-SUN Field Area Network (FAN) technical specification, successful solutions will be interoperable with a global footprint of more than 89 million devices worldwide, providing increased commercial opportunity for participants. The winners of each challenge will get a chance to collaborate with leading cities to refine their solutions and will be featured in a marketing campaign to Itron’s global customer base of cities and utilities.

The application period is now open and will close on Jan. 4, 2019. To learn more about the challenges, sign up for more information and submit your application, visit https://itron.com/smart-city-challenge.


Quotes
“This challenge represents our vision to tap into the developer community to catalyze innovation and economic development in leading global cities. It also demonstrates the strength and flexibility of Itron’s IoT network, which enables a multitude of solutions to address any number of smart city challenges. What’s really exciting about this program is that these challenges are relevant to almost all cities around the world, and our city partners are equally interested in the solutions provided for the others.”
-    Itai Dadon, Director of smart cities and IoT at Itron

“As an innovative and international hub at the heart of London, it is essential that we are intelligent and open when considering new infrastructure. Collaborating with smart cities innovators like Itron will support the City Corporation’s ambitious efforts to futureproof this world class destination. In order to avoid members of the public falling into or entering the river within the City of London, it is vital to find new ways to improve safety and we are excited to participate in the Smart City Challenge to address this.”
-    Carolyn Dwyer, Director of the Built Environment at the City of London Corporation

 “As one of the world’s top sporting cities and a major destination for conferences and concerts, the City of Glasgow is looking to improve travel choices and experience during events in the city. We are excited about this unique opportunity to participate in Itron’s Smart City Challenge and evaluate solutions that can easily connect to our existing network to help move large numbers of people through our city.”
-    Councilor Susan Aitken, Leader of Glasgow City Council