Brussels, April 2014 – Project partners from across Europe gathered in Brussels to launch a major new EU-funded project, ECIM – the European Cloud Marketplace for Intelligent Mobility. ECIM is designed to help support smart, liveable and connected cities by fostering and bringing together state of the art transportation services that make it easier for people and goods to move between destinations as quickly, cheaply and greenly as possible.

ECIM will use the cloud to create a market place for transportation solutions that cities and SMEs alike can use to create, deploy and sell smart urban mobility applications,’’ said Gorazd Marinič iMinds Project Coordinator and Director of Living Labs at the Brussels-based iMinds.  ‘’Thanks to ECIM, new service creators from across the world will be able to take advantage of an advanced cloud marketplace to add their own services for addressing the critical mobility challenges facing cities everywhere from congestion and overcrowding through to inaccessibility and pollution.  They will also be able to use our unique service catalogue to create innovative new ‘mashed up’ solutions to problems we don’t yet even know about.

Many mobility service creators still struggle to obtain data sources in order to develop new services and find an accessible and cost-effective mechanism to market their existing services. Many city managers still struggle to find open and cost effective delivery platforms that meet the mobility needs of local areas. Many service users still struggle to navigate an overwhelming array of mobile and web applications, particularly as such services require multiple, time consuming registrations. ECIM is designed to overcome all of these challenges by creating unique cloud-based infrastructure to gather resources, stimulate innovation, facilitate routes to market and dramatically modernize and improve transportation across Europe. 

‘’The new ECIM marketplace promises a future,’’ Gorazd Marinič said, ‘’where planning a journey into a crowded city is as simple as setting your alarm: Just a few clicks and the state-of-the-art services made possible by ECIM will do the rest. ECIM services will help users select the best transportation mode for their needs, direct them to the car park of their choice, send them live traffic updates, estimate their trip time in advance and guide them to their destination – all paid for, with nothing more than a click of your mobile phone.’’

ECIM is a €4,384,002 project which is co-funded under the European Commission’s Competitiveness and Innovation Programme 2007-2013.  The project contains 14 partners, including a range of innovative SMEs in the mobility space such as BePark, CEN Group, and Mobile-For, from 6 countries – Belgium, the UK, France, Luxemburg, Greece and Spain.