Iomob semi-finalists in the Pittsburgh City of Tomorrow Challenge
The City of Tomorrow Steering Committee with representatives from The City of Pittsburgh’s Department of Mobility and Infrastructure, Microsoft, and Dell, have selected iomob.net as one of 13 semi-finalists.
The City of Tomorrow Challenge was set up by Ford to provide a space where global and local communities can connect to explore their transportation needs and collaborate on new solutions.
It functions as a partnership between Ford, Dell Technologies, AT&T, and Microsoft, with ideas conceived and tested in three North American cities: Pittsburgh, Miami-Dade and Grand Rapids.
In each city, the challenge brings together government, business and communities, to crowdsource and identify new mobility solutions. The hope is for these solutions to have both an immediate and sustainable impact for improved quality of life for residents and support broader planning efforts in the cities.
iomob a Semi-Finalist
Pittsburgh’s City of Tomorrow Challenge focuses on making the city more green and sustainable while also prioritising the community.
As a five-step process — Explore > Propose > Refine > Select > Pilot — the challenge aims first to understand the mobility barriers that the city faces through working in collaboration with industry, governance and community stakeholders, to identify people’s core mobility needs.
Through this process, the city was able to choose a specific focus point: “designing commutes in Pittsburgh that are seamless, welcoming and intuitive”.
Out of 129 projects submitted, the steering committee selected the iomob’s “Blockchain-based Internet of Mobility Protocol”, as one of the 13 semi-finalists in the City of Tomorrow: Pittsburgh Challenge.
The team is now one-step closer to winning the pilot funding of $100K.
The Process
The Refine phase of the challenge started on Friday, October 19 and concludes on Tuesday, November 20. During the Refine phase, the teams have the opportunity to turn their proposals into a ready to pilot solution.
Each semi-finalist is required to submit a Detailed Proposal at the end of the Refine Phase on November 20. Winners will be selected based primarily on their Detailed Proposal.
Iomob’s proposal is a scheme to make the city’s mobility more seamless, user-orientated and decentralised through its blockchain-based open mobility protocol.
The winning proposals will be piloted in the city with the backing of a $100,000 grant.
The Proposal
iomob hope to win the challenge and pilot our solution, which enables the creation of an open collaborative mobility marketplace combining public and private, established and startup, mobility services in Pittsburgh.
“With this pilot Iomob aims to help Pittsburgh resolve first mile/last mile problems by enabling multimodal routing from the less dense suburbs to the city center. This would be just the first step towards the creation of a seamless open decentralized mobility marketplace for the residents and visitors of Pittsburgh” — Boyd Cohen, Ph.D. CEO IoMob
Our proposal will bring many benefits and opportunities to Pittsburgh’s different urban stakeholders. Mobility service providers (MSPs) who are interested in collaborating and competing in an open marketplace and to support solving first mile/last mile vie interconnectivity with public transit services will be key users of the Pittsburgh iomob solution.
Furthermore residents and visitors will benefit from access to a seamless user experience through theiomob app which enables discovery, routing, booking (and sign up for new services) and payment through a single app as opposed to the current fragmented marketplace.
Logistically-speaking, this solution would work as a Mobility as a Service (MaaS) pay as you go or monthly service solution for residents and visitors.
In the long-term, iomob’s solution could improve strategic planning for mobility in the city. Through collecting data about the mobility patterns and experience of users and providers alike, iomob and its Pittsburgh partners could explore the use of public transit by subscribers pre and post pilot implementation, and track and assess citizen satisfaction with the overall mobility services in the city.
The proposed solution will, therefore, generate rich aggregate data about mobility patterns, which could then be used to inform future investment in and planning of public transit. This information could also stimulate innovation, opening up new business opportunities for local entrepreneurs.
The iomob Team
iomob recently received investment from Centrality, an Asia-Pacific blockchain venture studio and formed a joint venture with them entitled ‘Senta Mobility’, focused on building an open Mobility as a Service (MaaS) solution.
The company is in the alpha stage of developing its technologies and believes that the Pittsburgh challenge funding could contribute to the completion of their final prototype and the adaptation of their technology to Pittsburgh’s specific local context.
Boyd Cohen, Ph.D. CEO IoMob, responded to the semi-final selection by saying that the company are “excited to have the opportunity to collaborate on such a project supported by Pittsburgh, Ford and IDEO”. He noted that “[…] all three are world-class partners and it would be an honour. We are all crossing our fingers!”
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