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Innovation now for the Smart City of tomorrow

a city with tall buildings in the background

Barcelona may be one of the world’s major global centers for tourism, the economy, trade and culture but, starting today, it’s the apex for smart cities. Our Microsoft for Smart Cities team and partners are excited to join government and civic leaders as well as experts at the Smart City Expo World Congress (SCEWC2019) to address key issues facing cities, including:

  • Digital transformation
  • Urban environment
  • Mobility
  • Governance and finance
  • Inclusive and sharing cities

Cities looking to modernize and transform their city services have turned to Microsoft and our vast partner ecosystem to help them digitally transform. At Microsoft, our goal is to empower cities with the tools they need to engage and connect with their citizens, modernize the government workplace, enhance government and city services, and help improve security. These topics are brought to life through customer stories, such as: San Diego County’s translation services and emergency portal services; Malaysia’s Mass Rapid Transit Corporation’s collaboration on massive construction projects in the cloud; City of Gandia’s IoT connected streetlights; and the city of Oulu’s move to the cloud that helped improve security and compliance while enabling mobility and collaboration for its employees.

We help cities achieve their goals by helping ensure trust, security, compliance, citizens skills and re-training, and promoting accessible and inclusive city services. We’ll be showcasing ways we can help cities digitally transform through AI and LinkedIn Learning, Dynamics365 Field Service using IoT, AI, and mixed reality, and our Smart City Digital Inclusion Maturity Model Assessment, a tool to help city and agency leaders gauge level of progress and commitment to ICT accessibility and digital inclusion as part of being a smarter city.

A few shining examples of Smart City work we’re announcing are:

Bringing weather services to Azure Maps :

Climate change poses serious threats to urban infrastructure, quality of life, and entire urban systems. Cities are highly vulnerable to the disruption of critical supplies. Bringing weather services to Azure Maps means cities now have a simple means of integrating highly dynamic, real-time weather data and visualizations into their applications.

Azure Maps now available on Azure Government Cloud:

The availability of Azure Maps on Azure Government Cloud means that approved U.S. government agencies can now easily include geospatial and location intelligence capabilities in solutions deployed on Azure Government Cloud. Cities can use Azure Maps for enabling geospatial and location intelligence capabilities for smart mobility, public safety, disaster and emergency management, criminal justice and more.

Azure Maps teams up with Moovit and Aira to help make transit more accessible and inclusive

Microsoft’s Azure Maps, together with Moovit, the leading Mobility as a Service (MaaS) solutions company and the maker of the world’s #1 urban mobility app and Aira, the remote assistance app providing blind and low vision users visual information on demand from trained professionals, are announcing a joint partnership which will make public transit more accessible for Aira’s users around the globe. Utilizing Microsoft’s Azure Maps, Aira agents can access efficient and reliable navigational tools to assist users in getting to their destination. Powered by Moovit’s Transit APIs to provide transit planning and navigation, agents can view and obtain information on multimodal trip planning, transit routes, and itineraries. Through the richness of Azure Maps and its integration with the mobility information and navigation that Moovit provides, Aira agents can now provide users with navigation guidance for their journey, ultimately delivering an optimal user experience.

Azure IoT Central: Democratizing IoT for all solution builders

The Azure IoT team recently released 11 new industry app templates, designed to illustrate the types of solutions our partners and customers can build across retail, healthcare, government, and energy. The new government app templates include water quality monitoring, water consumption monitoring, and connected waste management

Smart Cities powered by our partners

During SCEWC2019, Microsoft’s incredible partners will showcase modern solutions built on our cloud, AI and IoT. These powerful technologies are enabling smart cities around the world, and we’re proud to highlight partners such as:

  • Genetec will be exhibiting its broad portfolio of cloud-based public safety solutions. On display will be its full suite of public safety solutions, including its full suite of Cloud Services which has a wide-range of applications like city sustainability, safety, and mobility.
  • Axilion and Microsoft have qualified to the finals in the Mobility category in the SCEWC2019 award competition, with the deep tech solution performing continuous optimization of the traffic lights network via data-driven insights powered by Microsoft Azure. The innovative platform from Axilion enables planning, designing and deploying of a corridor or a city-wide grid with automated, AI-based suite of tools instead of planning one signal intersection at a time. Axilion and Microsoft also won a tender to deploy the Azure based technology in hundreds of traffic lights in the Tel-Aviv Metropolitan area including 19 surrounding cities, which will allow buses to get priority in the traffic lights while reducing the bus travel time.
  • Bentley Systems will have company executives on-site to share about their work on city-scale digital twins. With a digital twin, municipalities can create, visualize, and analyze a city-wide digital twin of its infrastructure. City stakeholders can gain new insights by modeling and simulating real-world situations, optimizing systems and processes, and monitoring the performance and condition of assets.

Connect with us at SCEWC2019

Want to learn more about how to build more accessible, connected, and secure cities? Join us in Barcelona, November 19–21, for the Smart City Expo World at booth B223.

Curious about Smart City Expo World Congress? See what we have planned.