Smart city technology provider CIMCON announced it has joined the Qualcomm Smart Cities Accelerator program.
Qualcomm’s approach has been to create a group of trusted technology partners to give cities and communities access to technologies to help members accelerate innovation and business growth.
CIMCON is the first smart city platform and lighting company added to the program. Its NearSky platform is used in 150 cities in 24 countries, combining hardware and edge processing as well as management software. It relies on Qualcomm chips and modems. CIMCON is based in Burlington, Massachusetts.
CIMCON provides intelligent, wireless lighting controllers that can be installed on LED, Solar and HID-based streetlamps. They use a wireless gateway via a mesh network to connect to CIMCON’s remote monitoring and management software. A city can watch for outages on individual lamps or schedule when lights can be turned off if not needed. The controls can also dim lights on particularly bright moonlit nights.
Cities have seen the biggest return on investment from lighting projects. Along with LED upgrades, cities can attach high definition cameras to monitor crowds, parking and traffic and sensors for pollution and noise. The problem for vendors of smart city tech is finding ways to partner with city officials for long-term projects that move beyond trial runs in a single neighborhood to entire sectors of a city.
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