10 March 2014: FI-WARE (@fiware) is an open cloud-based platform that enables software developers, entrepreneurs and well-established companies or public administrations to roll out Future Internet ideas, products or public services across multiple vertical sectors.
By accessing sectors like smart cities, smart industry, energy management, e-health, agrifood, tourism, environmental care, manufacturing or logistics, developers will be able to create new opportunities. They’ll be involved in innovative high-tech paradigms such as cloud, big data, IoT, multimedia-oriented services and applications management.
FI-WARE is developing, and thus de-facto-standardizing, the basic building blocks or Generic Enablers that will significantly reduce the complexity and time-to-market for developing such opportunities.
The full set of Generic Enablers Open Specifications are royalty-free and provided together with a reference implementation. In the near future, an open source implementation of the enablers will be provided.
Developers are also provided with the FI-LAB, a live instance of FI-WARE available for free experimentation.
This infrastructure was inaugurated by EU commissioner and VP Neelie Kroes (during the last Campus Party Europe tech festival – see video below) and has become the placeholder for massive hackathons and challenges, with prizes of the value €800,000+ being awarded.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5zrn3shhr8[/youtube]
As a project, FI-WARE is the cornerstone of the Future Internet PPP program, a joint action by the European Industry and the European Commission with more than 300 million Euro funding. FI-WARE includes major ICT players including ourselves, Orange, Deutsche Telekom, Telecom Italia, IBM, and Siemens, and is committed to encouraging entrepreneurship and innovation in Europe as well as promoting an open Internet for all. We’re the leading founder of the consortium behind FI-WARE.
The evolution of FI-WARE relies first on the innovative and synergic evolution of the Generic Enablers themselves, but also upon building up a community of developers and an ecosystem where open data and services provided by different smartcities are exposed to entrepreneurs for their convenience. Beyond FI-LAB, commercial or public instances of FI-WARE hosted in Datacenters all over the world are expected to continue once the community and ecosystems are mature enough.
Important parts of the roadmap are the feedback process and how entrepreneurs exploit FI-WARE. As a practical example, the two first prizes of the smart cities and smart business categories of the first round of FI-WARE challenges closed in the recent Brazil Campus Party. Awarded with €75,000 each, the winners were were:
- FI‐Guardian (smart cities): help intelligent cities become more resistant, aiding in communication, orientation and warning of adverse circumstances such as natural disasters.
- FoodLoop (smart businesses): reducing food retailers wastes and costs by automatically commercializing high-quality fresh products, in real time and with lower prices as expiration dates approach.
At present, FI-WARE has opened its 2nd round of challenges closing on 31 March 2014. Two main threads have been issued:
- Smart Society Challenge, awarded with a total of 200,000€ to find the most innovative projects that pursue societal benefits whilst using the FI-LAB platform. Internet applications that are focused on education, health, social inclusion are just a few examples of themes that can participate in this category. Track it as #FIware800K on Twitter.
- FI-WARE Excellence Challenge will award, with up to 141,000€, Internet applications that truly make the most out of FI-WARE technology.
Details on how to participate and other details on FI-WARE challenges are available here
Related Links:
FI-WARE http://www.fi-ware.org
FI-LAB http://www.fi-ware.org/lab
Awarded Projects http://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/en/news/finals-fi-ware-challenges-campus-party-2014-brazil
Fi-WARE videos http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5zrn3shhr8
