M2M Economy Team LiftOff — Free transportation for everyone!

Transportation that is free, as in beer. Who wouldn’t want that? Team LiftOff is going to figure out how to do just that. Fully utilize transportation capability of all existing cars by keeping them moving people to where they need to go without the need to own one, or the need to pay for its use. That big vision, starts with a simple concept: use what we have today to get as close as possible to where we want to be tomorrow. Team LiftOff applies algorithms found in nature to figure out how to make transportation free for everyone. And maybe even beer…

After 24 hours, the team have realized that the way they were developing the entire concept could be scaled up to remove even more boundary conditions than originally envisioned. According to team member Soumya Rai, “the vision has expanded a little bit and that is pretty much in line with the intention of the Machine to Machine Economy Track. So now what we’re trying to do is to not only look at transportation units which transport people or their needs, because that’s the concept. We’re also trying to study the patterns of movements of people because they realistically explained to us where do people want to be and use that as a blueprint for defining Smart Cities of the future.”

The M2M Economy Team LiftOff is focussing on BigchainDB as a solution. The starting point is defining transportation units which will integratedly talk to each other in a machine to machine ecosystem. The team takes its inpiration from nature, e.g. Ants. But they also use more mundane sources of inspriration, such as the Settlers of Catan game.

Soumya Rai: “I think everybody here likes that game. The idea is to include the predictability, the risk, and the randomness that is part of this game and many other games and use that as a starting point. However, because we move towards sort of a broader future we also look at this concept and we were talking to one of our Jedi was also explaining this and they did an experiment in Toronto a with the bookstore and then they saw the people from one area go a lot to the other area to the same bookstore. Why not replicate it? And that’s the kind of thing we’re trying to do here. We’re really thinking big because I believe that’s the potential of this track. We all believe that, but it will start with these kind of small abstract steps if we can get something you want or a place that you want to be close to you, why would you even want to go there, you know? Because the place is coming to you. That’s the approach!”