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.”
CopTrax In-car video is a software solution integrated with Google Glass and Stalker Radar. With no bulky DVR, the CopTrax software solution uses the patrol vehicle’s laptop to record and stream video through 3G/4G or WiFi for cloud storage or department’s servers. A command and control centre, accessible from any internet connected computer, displays device locations, search, and playback with GPS tracking data.
The International Road Federation (IRF) is now publishing its new quarterly journal featuring peer reviewed technical contributions by leading industry professionals. Called the IRF Examiner, this freely available publication addresses innovative road safety applications ranging from school zone safety projects in Abu Dhabi to rumble strips on rural highways.
Aesys, a specialist in the LED display industry, will be using Intertraffic Amsterdam 2014 to highlight its range of traffic variable message signs (VMS) with ULP Technology. The company claims ULP (ultra low power) is the best existing technology for low consumption applications. It enables high efficiency LEDs with ULP piloting, power supplies with low dispersion, optimised electronic control, heat dissipation without external air exchange and high thermal dissipation paint. In addition, the company says
Navtech Radar, the specialist manufacturer of radar-based automatic incident detection (AID) solutions, is unveiling its latest CTS350-X radar at the show. The unit is smaller, lighter and easier to install and commission than previous models and its response time for detecting a stopped vehicle and sending an alert is less than 10-15 seconds. It is suitable for automatic incident detection on bridges and strategic roads and in tunnels and covers up to 1,000m of road surface (500m radius) and detects people