Miovision is, in many ways, answering a call from cities worldwide that are seeking ways of unclogging congested roadways without building more of them. Technology like Miovision is developing could help make travel less painful while addressing broader societal problems like pollution and driver fatalities. But while the size of the market is vast, so is the competition from entrenched players and other startups looking to bring novel technologies to market.
That’s one reason Miovision plans to use this cash infusion to expand its technology beyond car counting and turn it into a traffic management system for so-called “smart cities.” Until now, Miovision has helped cities collect data on what’s happening at a given intersection, by installing its video systems at that intersection and analyzing the data afterward.
But simply providing the data, McBride realized, could make Miovision just another commodity product. After all, there are other video detection systems out there, as well as lower tech options, like magnetic loops embedded in the road that record passing traffic. Now, McBride wants to help cities find practical ways to use that data as well.
The company is slowly rolling out new hardware that will connect switchboards at each intersection to the cloud so street lights can communicate with each other and respond to traffic data from the video feed in real time. In other words, where once traffic data was updated every year or so by a college kid at the side of the road, now, it’ll be updated every instant.
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