LBS

£2 million transport location data competition

The Geospatial Commission has partnered with Innovate UK to create a new £2 million competition which will look at how location data can spark innovation and support the future of mobility for the United Kingdom.

This competition aims to stimulate commercial innovation to help create geospatial solutions to our transport challenges and support the future of mobility. The competition has four themes:

• Mobility as a service – to help better integration of transport modes

• Active travel – creating safer ways to enable active travel

• Supply chains – helping better distribution, storage and delivery

• Boosting capacity – increasing efficiency of transport networks.

www.gov.uk

Mitigating COVID-19 in Nigeria

To help mitigate the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic in Nigeria, Unacast, a location platform and analytics firm, and MTN Nigeria, the leading mobile telecommunications provider, recently announced a partnership in which the two will use privacy-friendly, aggregated and anonymized, human mobility insights derived from MTN’s network data, to make available a version of Unacast’s COVID-19 Social Distancing Scoreboard for Nigerian citizens and officials. Together, the companies will provide this easy-to-use dataset on a pro-bono basis to enable public officials, public health leaders and other organizations, and the public itself to understand and convey the importance of social distancing in fighting the spread of COVID-19.

The partnership between MTN and Unacast will make the Social Distancing Scoreboard available for Nigeria to help public & private enterprise, public health, NGOs, and governments make data driven decisions during the pandemic.

It will leverage Unacast’s Turbine platform for aggregated and anonymized telecommunication data via MTN. Turbine turns raw location data from mobile networks to privacy-safe, anonymized, and aggregated human mobility insights. The technology allows end users to distill vast datasets that accurately understand human mobility across a large area like Nigeria. www.mtnonline.com

Winvic secure Innovate UK Funding for Computer-Vision-SMART

Winvic is working on a second Innovate UK funded project, which aims to keep site staff even safer; the three organisations involved will together leverage the latest real-time image and machine learning technologies to detect, recognise and track hazards on a construction site, which will then alert nearby operatives via IoT enabled, GPS devices.

The Big Data Enterprise and Artificial Intelligence Lab (Big-DEAL) at UWE Bristol, and Bristol industrial intelligent video specialists One Big Circle are the two other organisations in the consortium that were successful in their application for an Innovate UK – the UK’s innovation agency – Smart Grant. www.winvic.co.uk

HERE offers rich geospatial data

HERE Technologies has released HERE Data Layers to improve software developer and data scientists’ access to the rich cartographic features and attributes captured within an enterprise-grade mapping platform. They are standalone geospatial representations of the world’s road networks, pathways, buildings, structures, places, land use and land cover. They serve as a menu for developers and data scientists to select the datasets needed to power today’s location-based functions, applications and customer experiences.

LEO Satellite Communication for Global Maritime Connectivity

Saab will, together with the companies ORBCOMM and AAC Clyde Space, lead a groundbreaking Swedish space project; to develop space based communication for the maritime sector via the new automatic tracking standard, VDES. The new VDES package does not only enable safer, more sustainable and greener shipping but the technology also has spin-off potential for other industries.

The company is now taking a next step and investing in a satellite project that will expand global data communication opportunities for the maritime industry but also potentially for other industrial Internet of Things (IoT) applications. The first demonstration satellite is intended to be followed by a larger constellation of satellites that will form the new part of the maritime communication infrastructure. https://saabgroup.com

Developing Geolocation IP solution for IoT modems

Synopsys, Inc. and Nestwave have announced a collaboration to combine Nestwave›s soft core GPS navigation IP with the Synopsys DesignWare® ARC® IoT Communications IP Subsystem for a complete low-power GNSS solution for integration into IoT modems. The collaboration will provide designers with a power-efficient, high-accuracy GPS solution for battery-operated devices without the additional cost of a dedicated GNSS chip. www.nestwave.com

Antenova adds high performer to its 5G antennas

Antenova Ltd, UK manufacturer of antennas and RF antenna modules for the Internet of Things and M2M applications has added a high performing 5G SMD design to its array of 5G antennas. This brand-new antenna, Lepida SR4L054, is a wideband antenna in SMD form, designed to achieve high efficiency and performance right across the spectrum from 600MHz to 3800MHz.

Lepida operates right across the cellular bands B71 (617-698 MHz), LTE 700, GSM850, GSM900, DCS1800, PCS1900, WCDMA2100, B40 (2300 – 2400 MHz), B7 (2500-2690MHz), and B78 (3300- 3800MHz). www.antenova.com