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.”
Autotalks will present Craton, which it says is the world’s first VLSI for Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) and related Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) communication. The complete functionality of an On-Board-Unit (OBU) is supported by Craton and its RFIC companion Pluton which together form a true automotive-grade V2V transceiver. Craton is capable of authenticating all over-the-air messages, eliminating the need for complex message selection algorithms.
Iteris has used this ITS America Annual Meeting to stage the world launch of Vantage Next, a product addition to its Vantage video detection product suite. The company says the new product represents the industry’s most advanced video detection system, featuring a scalable processing platform that provides full-motion streaming video, real time traffic data collection, and on-board Ethernet communications.
ITS Romania’s stand will host a live demonstration presenting the eCall system now operational in Romania under the HeERO project. The eCall service enables a car to automatically dial the European 112 emergency phone number if it is involved in a serious accident, while sending data to the most appropriate public service answering point. The eCall demonstrator will show how emergency calls are handled, by setting up a workstation in Vienna that will be able to answer eCalls generated in Romania. The demons
Streetline will showcase smart parking technology that combines sensors and a suite of applications to provide cities with real time and historical data and offer flexible parking options for residents and visitors while reducing traffic congestion in downtown areas. As the company points out, cities are facing the challenge of aging infrastructure, a growing population and limited financial resources.
