Panasonic Launches Smart City Innovation Showcase at Peña Station NEXT to Celebrate Company’s 100th Anniversary
Panasonic Corp. of North America’s CityNOW business unit has opened an immersive and interactive Smart City Innovation Showcase inside its Technology and Operations Center in Denver, Colorado. The 15,000-square-foot-facility features a 3D cityscape including a connected mobility district, commercial business district and sports and entertainment district designed to immerse visitors in a wide range of smart city solutions. The Smart City Innovation Showcase enables stakeholders, including cities, utilities and real estate developers to experience and engage in a real-world smart city environment to better understand how, why, and when they should deploy smart city solutions in their communities.
“Smart city solutions can be difficult to justify and deploy because they typically involve multiple city departments and external stakeholders. We seek to simplify and accelerate the process for our customers, and our experience is that smart city success requires all stakeholders to be closely aligned, and complex, multi-stakeholder issues thoughtfully addressed,” said Jarrett Wendt, executive vice president of Panasonic CityNOW. “Becoming a ‘smart city’ has little to do with technology, and almost everything to do with stakeholder alignment,” he added. “We help cities and developers optimize quality of life for their residents, businesses and visitors – and technology is simply an important but small component of the process.”
The Smart City Innovation Showcase includes a mix of Panasonic and third party products and solutions, and is intended to provide a hands-on experience when discussing complex topics such as smart streetlights and connected vehicle platforms.
Cities and utilities, for example, are upgrading streetlights across the nation and adding wireless controls to save energy, reduce crime and improve light quality. This decision, however, has wide-ranging policy and system implications for city assets such as fiber networks and the public right-of-way, and across multiple city departments including public works, police, fire, and economic development. The coming implementation of 5G technology, which involves the deployment of thousands of small cell sites across a city, will further amplify the importance of cities working together through these issues in advance.
Another example of smart city technology’s positive impact is in transportation. Commuting isn’t just slow and frustrating, it can also be dangerous. In a connected world, cars and highways can communicate to make roadways safer and less congested. Connected Mobility is the critical foundation for cities where travel will be increasingly electric, shared and autonomous. Panasonic’s Connected Vehicle platform is unlocking life-saving V2X technology. In partnership with the Colorado Department of Transportation, Panasonic is implementing the first statewide Connected Vehicle ecosystem that will generate enormous amounts of real-time contextual data to dramatically improve driver safety.
The Smart City Innovation Showcase opens today, March 7th, to commemorate Panasonic Corporation’s 100th anniversary. Showcase tours for cities, utilities, real estate developer and related smart city organizations are available by appointment only and not open to the general public.
