New Australian group pushes smart city, IoT standard

Hypercat Australia launches

Assistant minister for cities and digital transformation, Angus Taylor, yesterday helped launch an Australian counterpart of a UK organisation that pushes an Internet of Things standard intended to help promote the development of smart cities.

Hypercat Australia is the local counterpart of a UK-headquartered alliance that promotes the Hypercat standard. Hypercat is backed by a range of tech firms, including ARM, Broadcom, Cisco, Fujitsu, Huawei, IBM and Intel, as well other corporates and government bodies.

Local backers include KPMG, University of Technology Sydney IoT research hub Knowledge Economy Institute, Giant Ideas and Flexeye.

“It’s early days given the launch yesterday was the initial call for local membership, but in less than 24 hours we have received more than 40 registrations of interest for membership of Hypercat Australia through www.hypercat.io/australia.html,” said Piers Hogarth-Scott, national IoT leader of KPMG Australia.

“The goal of Hypercat is to accelerate the global explosion of the Internet of Things – by enabling connected devices and data to work together to improve how cities work, and how people live,” Hypercat Alliance founder Justin Anderson said in a statement.

Hypercat is an open JSON-based standard for exposing information about IoT devices over the Web.

“The Commonwealth is exploring relationships with different jurisdictions to build smart cities that improve our lives,” Taylor said in a statement. “Hypercat Australia is one such partnership which will allow a platform to facilitate cutting edge technology solutions to be applied to urban problems.”

The government’s Smart Cities Plan, published in late April, has ‘Smart Technology’ as one of its three key pillars. The document defines smart technology as “Thinking of technology solutions first”, “Leveraging open and real time data”, and “Driving use of energy efficient technologies”.

“The Australian Government has strengthened its assessment of infrastructure projects and now examines the extent to which new technologies are used to improve the efficiency, sustainability and services of infrastructure networks,” the document states.

Taylor last month announced the government would stage a series of stakeholder roundtables as part of the $50 million Smart Cities and Suburbs Program. The first roundtable will be held on 14 September in Melbourne.

A free IoT network was launched yesterday in Sydney's Barangaroo precinct.

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Tags Internet of Thingssmart citiesInternet of Things (IoT)Smart City

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