File photo used for representation only. Photo by: Salim Matramkot/ The Peninsula
Qatar, which is investing heavily in smart cities infrastructure and emerging technologies can be a business hub for generating smart solutions, a move that will create more opportunities for startups and entrepreneurs to introduce new products and services in the local and global markets, according to experts at the recently concluded Smart City Expo Doha 2022.
Speaking at the panel discussion on ‘A world of data startup solutions making use of urban data’, Faisal Al Kuwari, Chief Technology Officer at MEEZA highlighted how entrepreneurs and startups use urban data to offer new solutions to benefit citizens and public authorities.
He said: “Smart city is a city that uses technology to improve citizens’ lives. It includes services that target citizens, operational excellence for companies to perform better by reducing cost, and is environmental. Data is not only important for planning a city, it is equally important for private sectors and startups.
And data availability depends on initiatives from the government and private sector to improve the services offered for all smart city experts. Without data, startups cannot generate ideas for cities”.
Speaking about Qatar’s smart cities Al Kuwari noted: “If we use our model in multiple cities around Doha we can create and generate more traffic to our country and make it a business hub and a destination for surrounding countries to come here and see those models for adoption. We have entities who are working with local companies to generate smart solutions. And people measure startups on innovation as they are looking for an innovative idea, growth, management and social impact”.
Responding to a query on the future of smart cities, Al Kuwari said: “We need to encourage new generations to come up with ideas and reach their goals. The main function of QSTP as an incubator is to link companies with startups and QSTP is a technology transformation centre which takes that technology and commercialises it. Some of the startups have already won contracts, which proves that there is future for those types of services”.
He added: “We need more investment and funding to help startups and incubate ideas. Qatar Foundation, Ministry of Communications and Technology (MCIT), Ministry of Transport (MoT), Ministry of Interior (MoI), and the Ministry of Environment have data that can help these startups have use cases to develop their business”.
Also addressing the conference, Grant Totten, Head of Data & AI for TASMU Platform gave details about Tasmu initiatives and how it supports
startups.
Grant Totten said: “There is a lot of data being generated across the country across multiple sectors. For Tasmu the focus is how to leverage data whether it is generated from IoT devices, unstructured data like video, images and from other data sources that fall within the smart city context, and how do we leverage that to drive positive outcomes to make the lives of citizens, residents and visitors better. At Tasmu, we help enable smart cities use cases across health, logistics, transportation, sports, and environment, and the ability to create these use cases for example, smart parking, air quality, and more”.
He added: “We offer the ability to create ecosystem between government, business and startups to leverage data opportunity. We provide data in a very organised structure which complies to GDPR, to Qatar’s data privacy policies. Data is a collaboration which impacts citizens and residents and leveraging data requires collaboration and at the foundation of that is governance of that data to ensure that privacy is taken into account”.
Speaking about future of smart cities, Totten noted that skilling is a very important and key aspect, while digital enablement can be done to train people for skills that may be missing in the startup ecosystem.
