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.”
Sensys is launching a new-generation 3D radar, adding vehicle and lane classification capabilities to its existing, fixed Doppler radar product, which will continue to be sold alongside the new arrival. Both act as the trigger for a series of enforcement applications.The new features come at the request of customers, says Business Development Director Magnus Liljegren, and a first live installation was due as this show opened. “We currently have an installed base of around 3,000 radar systems worldwide,
Cloud Parc is debuting its smart parking camera solutions in the Entrepreneurial Village, highlighting its ability to automatically detect unused parking spaces through visual analysis. Each LPR camera can monitor up to 10 spaces while the company’s Sky camera can monitor an entire city block. According to Kerrian Bard Fournier, COO, Cloud Parc
Denso is showing what it says are the largest head-up display (HUD) images to be used in a vehicle environment. Its system – although in a slightly smaller format – has already been installed in Kia’s new K9 luxury car and Denso says it is in talks with US and European manufacturers over adopting the system. The image area produced by the HUD on Denso’s stand measures 230 x 90mm, with road information such as speed limits and directions being projected into the driver’s line of sight.
IBM announced the opening of a new information control centre in São Paulo, Brazil, capturing, linking and unifying data from 19 TMCs across the state–an area that includes 4,000 miles of state highways serving a population of 20 million people in 271 cities.