Irish Start Ups Invited to Apply for Smart Cities Accelerator in Canary Wharf

Today we have a guest article from Mikele Brack. With more than 20 years’ experience in environmental planning, urban development and technology across Europe, North America and Asia, Mikele is a leading expert in smart cities and the Head of Smart City Programmes for Cognicity. You can follow Mikele on Twitter here.

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Ireland has long been recognised as a global technology hub. It is home to nine of the world’s top ten global software companies and four of the world’s top five IT services companies. The technology sector in Ireland employs over 37,000 people and generates €35 billion in exports annually. Without doubt, Ireland is tech-savvy.

More specifically, Ireland is also becoming an important centre for smart cities and IoT technologies. For example, in 2010 IBM chose Dublin as the location for its first ever Smarter Cities Technology Centre. The Centre’s R&D programmes include smarter building systems for energy-efficient buildings, smart grid technologies, integrated city operations and real-time monitoring for urban transportation.

Dublin is also home to the Future Cities Research Centre, a multidisciplinary research facility at Trinity College Dublin that takes a holistic approach to addressing the challenges facing growing urban centres. And in 2013 Dublin City University revealed that it is developing a Master’s degree focused on Big Data and Smart City technologies.

To top that all off, Dublin was one of the winning cities of the IBM Smart Cities Challenge last year, while National Geographic recently suggested that Dublin is fast becoming an “unexpected capital for the Internet of Things”.

These are just some of the reasons why the Cognicity Challenge, a leading smart cities accelerator in London’s Canary Wharf, is inviting Irish smart city startups to apply for our accelerator programme.

Cognicity is a pioneering project set up by Canary Wharf Group in order to identify and accelerate the development of smart city technologies and integrate them into the Canary Wharf estate. The accelerator is divided into six streams, and the six winning startups will each receive £50,000 and the opportunity to pilot their technologies within the Canary Wharf estate.

If you would like to help build the city of the future in Canary Wharf, or if you just want to learn more about the Cognicity initiative, you can find all the details on the Cognicity website.