Christmas comes early for iomob as December opens with some rather grand updates!
As per our November news, iomob has been competing in the Ford City of Tomorrow Challenge™ in Pittsburgh, hosted by Ford Motor Company (yes, that Ford, the automotive company).
We are now very proud to announce that iomob won this very competitive challenge of 129 original applicants and 13 shortlisted projects, and will get a chance to implement a pilot of our open urban mobility solution in the city of Pittsburgh in the coming months. (Read CEO Boyd Cohen’s interview in the local media here.)
The Ford City of Tomorrow Challenge™ is a crowdsourcing platform created to help prepare cities for the future, bringing groups of people together to design and pilot new solutions to help improve mobility in cities. Mayor of Pittsburgh, Bill Peduto, presented the award at a ceremony in Pittsburgh last week.
“The people of Pittsburgh were integral to this Challenge,” said Pittsburgh Mayor William Peduto. “They defined the need. Testing this in the real world, they will also help us evaluate this as a solution. We appreciate the partnership with Ford in not only thinking deeply about the challenges we face, but helping us to act quickly to find the ideas and entrepreneurs that can help address them.”
Being the winners of this competition, iomob not only receives this once in a lifetime opportunity, but also an attractive prize pool — $50,000 — which should help with the implementation of our protocol in Pittsburgh!
In case you are new to our updates, @iomob is a user-friendly, open and inclusive form of “mobility as a service” aimed at addressing “inefficiencies” in a multi-modal but “fragmented mobility landscape.” Iomob allows end-users to discover, combine, book, and pay for the mobility services that best cover their needs at a given point of time. Iomob will be implemented as an open-source, decentralized platform that leverages blockchain to allow all mobility providers to easily join the platform. By connecting all the mobility operators in an area, iomob aims to enable users to find better combinations of services for any given trip.
Joseph Sudar, who has been running a consulting company in Pittsburgh, will be leading the local implementation of the pilot.
Joseph, who is a new member of the iomob team, expressed these thoughts on the value of iomob to the Pittsburgh community:
Iomob presents a true win-win-win scenario for mobility. A win for consumers/users of transportation by providing optimized solutions based on their own preferences and schedules. A win for public transportation by funnelling more riders to their system, particularly the hard to service end of line nodes. And a win for multi-modal service providers by linking them to potential customers seeking a solution through iomob’s open platform, with the need for very little to no IT resource requirements on their part.
Throughout the City of Tomorrow Challenge workshops, which began in July, iomob initiated conversations with Pittsburgh transportation companies, including fellow challenge runner-up Ruby Ride and the team that proposed Pittsburgh water taxis. As a first step in the pilot, iomob will work to secure more local companies on board the platform.
Looking at Pittsburgh from a mobility point of view, it definitely comes across as a great place for innovation to take place. A 2014 article by BikePGH tells us that by 2014, Pittsburgh had already seen a 408% increase in bike commuting. Talk about early adopters!
However, this does not mean that cars have become few and far between, as they still reign supreme when it comes to transport. Here’s iomob CEO Boyd Cohen’s thoughts on the matter:
Pittsburgh is a city like many in the U.S. that has some sprawl, and less density than European cities, for example. As a result, it has a higher car dependence than other cities.
He then goes on to praise Pittsburgh’s proclivity to implementing mobility solutions:
At the same time it’s a city embracing innovation, its been an early adopter in exploring and piloting autonomous vehicles […] they are embracing open innovation and identifying global and local startups that can transform the mobility experience.
Cohen realizes the potential for iomob, as Pittsburgh’s private businesses attempt to capitalize on the inaccessibility to transit:
There are several emerging players in the mobility ecosystem in Pittsburgh, which is a perfect mix for iomob due to the growing fragmentation in the market.
Iomob is in conversations with ten cities globally that are interested in implementing the platform. The Pittsburgh pilot, which will last about six months, will test the platform on a group of designated early adopters, before becoming available for public download.
Enjoyed the read and excited to see what iomob has in store for Pittsburgh? Give us some claps, we appreciate the love!
Further Reading:
For more information on the semi-finalists and other proposals that were submitted, visit the City of Tomorrow Challenge website.
Watch Boyd’s interview on CNBC:
About us:
iomob is working to decentralize and build the Internet of Mobility, by incentivizing and facilitating the use of alternative transport. By using the blockchain, iomob plans to minimize fees and allow mobility providers and end-users alike to connect on a peer-to-peer basis. In their own words: iomob is “a system which produces a useful output at the lowest possible marginal cost.”Learn more about iomob by connecting with us:
