Focussing on harnessing the power of realtime data in a decentralized, scalable way, the award winning open source project Streamr has spent the last six months developing partnerships and building relationships with various stakeholders in the automotive and transport sector. These range from car and component manufacturers, hardware and software companies, local and central governments, highways authorities, maintenance companies, technology startups, and civil engineering consultancies from all over the world. These organisations have already started to help us solve some key data challenges including:

Data limitations surrounding road surface quality

Unreliable and inadequate data sets for use in traffic models

Inadequate information on driver behaviour used for assessing insurance premiums

Use Cases

The Streamr Partnerships team has identified three use cases, which have been subsequently validated with experts in the transport and smart cities sectors. They involve gathering various types of realtime data from vehicles. This data is then streamed via the Network, our realtime data transportation layer and made available for sale to data consumers on the Streamr Marketplace.

The Network will be decentralized in stages over the coming years, creating a vastly more scalable, low latency, P2P infrastructure for the IoT-Smart City data economy. Because it will benefit from the utilisation of sunk cost computing hardware, it will operate at a much lower price to the user than solutions currently provided by incumbents.

Streamr’s soon to be released Community Product feature for the Marketplace will also further the development of data products in a revolutionary way. For the first time, data buyers will be able to bulk subscribe to streams of data originating from many multiple and independently owned data producing gadgets such as home sensors, wearable IoT devices and vehicles and directly remunerate those owners. For the data buyer this will facilitate purchasing multiple and disparately owned data products in a “one click” fashion. For the individual and independent data producers of a gadget, the Community Product will bring them the opportunity to bundle their data with others to create more value for their individual stream and be directly paid for their own data. This pattern of individual and independent data streams bundled by gadget type, geographic location or other descriptors, into one product and then made available for sale, will form the bedrock of the new Smart City data economy.