As visitors to the Q-Free booth at the ITS World Congress Detroit will see, the company has transformed its portfolio, shifting from a predominant focus on tolling to cover all aspects of road operations – financing, condition monitoring, real-time management and emerging cooperative ITS applications.
September 7, 2014
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Transforming the portfolio: Jenny Simonsen of Q-Free
As visitors to the 108 Q-Free booth at the ITS World Congress Detroit will see, the company has transformed its portfolio, shifting from a predominant focus on tolling to cover all aspects of road operations – financing, condition monitoring, real-time management and emerging cooperative ITS applications.
With the event being staged in Detroit, it provides Q-Free with an opportunity to highlight its appreciable presence in the North American market. Recently it acquired 5660 Open Roads Consulting, a specialist in advanced transportation management and traveller information systems that operates mission-critical traffic systems and undertakes video-based surveillance of critical assets in 30 states across the US.
Previously, Q-Free bought 7045 TCS International, a US-based, international supplier of advanced parking guidance systems. Meanwhile, Dacolian USA, another Q-Free group company, is North America’s major supplier of automatic number plate recognition and vehicle signature recognition image processing software.
Nevertheless, says Thomas Falck, CEO, these developments have to be considered in an international context: “The North American region will play an increasing part in our future but it is the international nature of our business which remains one of our core strengths. We will be keen to demonstrate at the 6456 ITS World Congress that with offices around the world, we have a huge range of talent and experience on which to draw. This means we can create solutions which benefit from the best of global practice but which, nevertheless, are closely tailored to local needs.”
Scottish firm Findlay Irvine has developed a sophisticated new microgrip testing system. This is a walk-behind surface friction measurement unit that shares many operating capabilities with the firm’s proven towed unit.
Business development manager Campbell Waddell explained: “It works on the same principle as the towed machine. We developed it as we kept getting asked to use the trailer based unit for jobs it wasn’t suited to, like pedestrian areas and cycleways.”
The Siqura BC620WDR from TKH Security Solutions is claimed to be the only camera on the market to offer an integrated adaptor for Ethernet over co-ax in addition to interface options for streaming IP over fibre-optic or Cat 5 cables. With an embedded video analytics system and multi-stream encoding the BC620WDR meets industry-wide demands for an upgrade solution for legacy systems, TKH says.
Eberle Design has announced the new ADU Auxiliary Display Unit, which is used in conjunction with the company’s ITS signal cabinet components. The ADU is a rack-mounted display module which full four-colour/32-channel LED intersection display.
Uninterruptible power systems (UPS) specialist Clary reports strong sales since introduction of its SP1250LX product at the 2011 ITS World Congress in Orlando. The new equipment features a number of innovations introduced to complement previous models in Clary’s range of UPS units. Most notably, the SP1250LX features surface mount electronics in place of substantial wiring. The new units are therefore considerably less labour intensive to manufacture. They are also lighter and more compact, saving on space
