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
Read time: 2 mins
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.”
ERTICO's international cooperation efforts have a new focus in China thanks to the start of the MODIBEC Project on 1 January. This European Commission-supported initiative is a 24-month multipartner Coordination Action that intends to promote and support RTD cooperation between EU and China on digital broadcasting technologies - especially the convergence with mobile communications. It continues the efforts of ERTICO's previous EUChina cooperation projects. Main activities MODIBEC will bring European and Ch
With over five months to go before the 18th World Congress on Intelligent Transport Systems gets underway in Orlando, Florida (from October 16-20), 89 per cent of the current exhibit floor plan has now been reserved, according to ITS America's director of business development, Barbara M. O'Connor.
Vaisala is here at Intertraffic to highlight the latest in road weather ITS technologies. As the company points out, snow, ice, and flooding are all conditions that can drastically reduce any road network, no matter how sophisticated it is. Vaisala says that using its expertise in the industry, and listening to customers around the globe, the company has focused its weather related ITS solutions on products that provide the industry with the best low life cycle cost.
With more than seven million tolling tags nearing the end of their life, delegates to ITS Australia’s 2014 National Electronic Tolling Conference had more than a passing interest debating possible ways forward. Rex Wright, chair of the Australian Toll Road Users’ Group, said the industry was potentially facing an AUD$100million bill over the next five years but the toll operators are committed to a unified national approach, consistent with the current interoperability.
