The Streets Are Watching You: Say ‘Hello’ To iPavement

Our streets are about to become a lot more intelligent. At least, that’s the plan if the group of Spanish innovators behind the revolutionary iPavement have their way.

Via Inteligente plans to make boulevards and avenues multi-media experiences in which you and your iPhone or Android smartphone is fed information about the weather, local events and even offered Groupon-style offers.

The Madrid-based ICT company have developed an ‘intelligent pavement’ which is embedded with applications and tools that the local authority which owns the walkways wants to offer to passers-by. This will include information such as maps, details about nearby tourist attractions, music, local cultural events as well as coupons offering deals at local shops and restaurants. The pavement will even be able to send welcome and warning messages to people on the street.

The technology is simply but very smart: Wi-Fi and Bluetooth wireless technology is integrated into a piece of calcic carbonate (a marble produced widely in Spain) that allows radio frequencies to pass through it. To keep costs down, not every paving slab is ‘wired up’. Ordinary slabs are interspersed with the more complex ones but with the same ‘look and feel’.

All the apps and data are cloud-based so they can be updated regularly with no need to remove the pavement.

Of course, the potential of this system for business – and in particular, data gathering – is immense. Via Inteligente thinks the iPavement will also become a sensor network for gathering useful information about such metrics as pedestrian traffic flows and ambient air temperature.

Their Analytics iPavement app will feed data to the local authority which will be able to use it to plan things like its transport system and public works programmes.

Via Inteligente is trialling the iPavement in Madrid but anticipate rolling it out in Europe and beyond. Targets include Buenos Aires and San Francisco with the emphasis on sidewalks and plazas that have degraded and are already scheduled to be refurbished. They are also targeting other so-called ‘smart cities’ in Europe such as Skolkovo in Russia and the PlanIT development in Portugal.

The days when you could take a quiet stroll down your favourite boulevard may be numbered…

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