InterDigital’s oneTransport Data Marketplace: The Future of Smart City Monetization

Mobile technology R&D vendor InterDigital has announced the launch of the oneTRANSPORT data marketplace as a commercial service in the United Kingdom. It is aimed at unlocking real-time and historical data from hitherto fragmented intelligent transportation and smart city systems and solutions, combining a standards-based approach based on the oneM2M framework, avoiding proprietary-system lock-in and licensing schemes to kickstart an ecosystem of public and private developers of innovative transportation solutions. The oneTRANSPORT data marketplace was showcased at the Mobile World Congress 2018 in Barcelona.

The launch follows a 2-year project with 300 different datasets shared across 11 public and private partners. Northamptonshire County Council, Oxfordshire County Council, Arup, Worldsensing, and Traak Systems are already actively participating in the oneTRANSPORT data marketplace.

The data marketplace is set up in a way that allows data owners to distribute their data to multiple transportation solution providers for free through an Open Data license, or for a fee determined by the data owner. The oneTRANSPORT marketplace acts as an intermediary between organizations that access the data and the data owners, tracking data usage and managing revenue streams. It operates on the Chordant cloud-based smart city platform. Guiding principles include a seamless “publish once, distribute to many” architecture, flexible licensing and monetization schemes, cloud storage and archiving, and IoT standards-based APIs.

InterDigital claims that applications and benefits include demand-response services matching existing resources and assets to varying levels of mobility needs, seamless traveler experiences, optimized transit and road infrastructure planning, and adjacencies through data sharing across verticals like healthcare, environment, and energy. On a more general level, open data policies drive urban economic growth as well as reducing the cost of mobility service provisioning to citizens. Participants also highlight that this data-sharing ecosystem is especially relevant for smaller cities, allowing them to embark on smart city projects in a cost-effective way.

The oneTRANSPORT open, standardized, marketplace for transport data is a good example of governments and private industry enabling new business models for optimized multimodal transport. It allows transport authorities to leverage economies of scale while reducing costs in the longer term. This new trend of bringing together ecosystem players and tech suppliers in dedicated marketplaces allows mitigating some of the friction in sourcing smart city technology. Aggregating multiple ecosystem partners providing scalable, interoperable, and vendor-agnostic platforms, data services, and applications ensures seamless integration into legacy platforms and future migrations to new platforms at minimal cost. Smart city marketplaces heavily depend on IoT technology vendors’ adoption of open platforms, exposing APIs to third-party developers and/or making code available as open source to further leverage the power of the emerging smart city ecosystem.

However, the momentum behind marketplaces is by no means limited to smart city environments, with multiple recent examples in fleet management, telematics, and the wider IoT ecosystem:

Geotab Marketplace: As one of the pioneers of open platforms and marketplaces in the conservative commercial telematics space, Geotab recently announced having reached the important milestone of 1 million subscribers (connected vehicles), posting an impressive 116% average annual subscriber growth since 2006. There is no doubt that its innovative ecosystem play has been an important driver behind its expansion and success.

Ericsson IoT Accelerator Marketplace: Recently launched and showcased at MWC 2018, Ericsson’s IoT marketplace is aimed at unlocking value for service providers across the ecosystem by exposing global cellular connectivity APIs, an application storefront, and enabling monetization; it’s an extension of its Connected Vehicle Marketplace launched at MWC 2017.

In an increasingly crowded and competitive smart city platform ecosystem, fragmentation is looming large. The increasingly likely scenario of a “platform of platforms” approach will require interoperability, standardization, and ecosystem enablement for seamless interaction between a large range of specialized, dedicated platforms addressing specific vertical and/or technology/product-centric requirements. This is clearly how InterDigital sets its Chordant smart city platform apart from most of its competitors, many of which still favor proprietary solutions, vertically integrated approaches, or worse, advancing the increasingly less credible claim of addressing all requirements through one single platform and/or an end-to-end solution.

Adding the commercial layer of marketplaces on top of standardized, open platforms is how IoT ecosystems will operate in the future. Visionary technology vendors like InterDigital, Ericsson, and Geotab have understood this very well and are already achieving significant competitive advantages with this approach.

The smart city platform ecosystem is covered in detail in the ABI Research report Smart CitiesPlatforms and Standards(AN-2582).