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.”
Cooperative systems in which vehicles communicate with each other (vehicle-to-vehicle or V2V) and to the road infrastructure (V2I) and collectively referred to as V2X, will build the backbone for safe driving as well as efficient and environmentally-friendly road usage in the future. So Kapsch is very much looking to the future with its V2X demonstration at the ITS World Congress by showcasing how such cooperative communication can avoid accidents, optimise fuel consumption, driving speed and travel time. P
New Zealand-based Frogparking is showing a new, GPS-enabled electronic parking permit that gives parking companies more visibility of their customers’ movements. The permit can be scanned by parking wardens to check its validity, while a built-in accelerometer allows the parking company to know exactly when a driver has parked or moved off, enabling precise billing of the time used.
Italian company Insico (INnovation SIgn Consulting) will feature its backlit waterproofed safety sign innovation at Intertraffic Amsterdam 2014. Developed to improve safety signs, it uses an active system based on light diffusion technology and a passive system, in the case of sudden loss of electricity, with the use of special retro-reflective semi-transparent films. The device can be manufactured in different sizes, graphics and colours and is perfect for both indoor and outdoor use.
The Qatar Mobility Innovations Center (QMIC) is the first independent innovation institute in the Gulf Region to focus on creating and delivering to the market mobility solutions based on emerging wireless technologies. It is exhibiting here at the World Congress for the first time in order to showcase growing transport technology expertise in the Gulf region and to attract international partners for the two-way exchange of information and expertise. “Each of the world’s markets has its unique characteristi
