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.”
Finnish company Noptel is demonstrating its Speeder X1 and CMP52 laser distance measurement sensors at the show.
The Speeder X1 uses a dual laser transmitter to provide overlapping vehicle profile analysis for speed, height and length measurement, while the CMP52 single-beam laser radar is applicable to a range of traffic control and law enforcement duties.
Signpost Solutions, a UK-based specialist in passive safety since 1996, will use Intertraffic Amsterdam 2014 for the international launch of Optimast, a new range of highly competitive passively safe sign masts. The company says that Optimast plugs a gap in its ability to commercially meet the requirements for certain bending capacities which in the past would have necessitated a largely over-engineered design.
Optimast was crash rested in the UK at MIRA testing grounds in Nuneaton to BS EN 12767 and ac
German company Covisys develops a range of high performance machine vision for many industries, including automotive, using cutting edge HTML5 technologies like WebRTC for video streaming and WebSockets for control of its smart cameras and devices.
Its CarID vehicle licence plate detection and recognition system can be used to identify vehicles accessing public car parks and to control vehicle input and output fl ow in restricted areas.
A select group of startups will have the chance to rub elbows Wednesday evening with ITS leaders and strategic investment firms at a special reception on the top floor of the Crowne Plaza Detroit Downtown Riverfront Hotel. These entrepreneurs, early-stage startups and mid-stage startups are hoping to secure their next round of investment to help fund development, sales, marketing and general growth.
