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
Read time: 2 mins
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.”
Kowa has added new lenses to its range, especially designed for ITS applications. These lenses have a mechanically modified focus ring which makes it easier to focus at distances of 10-45m, typical working distances for ITS applications.
Cohu has announced two new senior appointments at the top of its Electronics Division: Thomas D Kampfer is Cofu Electronics’ new President and General Manager; Nuriel Lapidot is the division’s new Vice President of Engineering.
Turkish company Vendeka is looking to expand its operations internationally after completing what it describes as the first passive RFID-based tolling project in Europe. The company installed the system on the Bosphorus Bridge, which links Europe and Asia. Previously, tolling was achieved by a card-based system, but traffic jams were caused by drivers stopping to place their cards in the readers. This has been replaced by Vendeka’s passive RFID system. A major advantage, says Vendeka, is that a passive RFID
The e-Vignette system of collecting and controlling road user charges has the advantage of simplicity while achieving high compliance from drivers, says service provider AGES. The electronic vignette has superseded the paper vignette as a convenient and faster service without the expense of printing and distributing physical authorisation for road use. Vignette road charging services are time based, requiring neither costly on-board equipment nor interaction with roadside infrastructure. The e-Vignette is i
