Hi #smartcommunity friends! In this episode of the Smart Community Podcast, I have a wonderful talk with Emily Bobis. Emily is the co-founder of Compass IoT, a multi-award winning road intelligence startup that helps transport professionals improve road safety, transport, and infrastructure through connected vehicle data and the perfect guest for our first #mobilitymay episode. Emily begins by telling us about her background in startups, her passion for; innovation, mentorship, entrepreneurship and putting ideas into practice, before she tells us what a Smart Community means to her. Emily then shares a bit about her own startup Compass IoT and some of the exciting projects they have been working on, and explains what connected vehicle data is. Emily then dives a little deeper into how she got into startups and in particular how she started her own, and discusses some of the surprising things she has learned in her experiences working in startups and with data. We finish our chat discussing the emerging trends of digitising intelligent transport systems, building infrastructure to better support autonomous vehicles and the trend of push data. As always, we hope you enjoyed listening to this episode as much as we enjoyed making it!

Listen here: 

What we cover in this episode:

• Emily’s background in startups and her current work with her own startup Compass IoT
• Her passion for innovation, mentorship, entrepreneurship and putting ideas into practice
• What a Smart Community means to Emily
• A bit about Emily’s company Compass IoT and the exciting projects they have been working on 
• What connected vehicle data is 
• How Emily got into startups and in particular how she started her own 
• Some of the surprising things Emily has learned in her experiences working in startups and with data
• The emerging trends of digitising intelligent transport systems, building infrastructure to better support autonomous vehicles and the ability now to push data as opposed to just pulling data 

Quotes: 

“Great ideas are great. But unless you act on them, they [are] pointless.” 

“I think a Smart Community is one that is agile, dynamic, and I think has a flexible mindset, or at least the capacity to embrace change. I think there needs to be diverse decision makers involved in that process to make sure that it benefits everybody within the community.”

“I don’t think [Smart Communities is] a static thing. And I think the definition will potentially change over time. But I also don’t think you can just be future focused. Or embrace future focused ideas. If you’re very like static, it’s like the future is created by the actions of today. So if you do nothing, then you get nothing.”

“[Compass IoT] basically uses connected vehicle data to make things better in cities. I think that’s the core of it. And I think connected vehicle data is one of the next big things and I think people are talking about it. But they’re not necessarily understanding the actual behaviour that it is and the impact that it can have.” 

“We need to set up our institutions and the people within those institutions to be able to take risks on innovation, instead of rewarding them for staying the safe course.”

“Autonomous vehicles [is a good] example where we are building these really high tech cars, and putting them on roads that were not built for them. And I think there’s been a bit of a paradigm shift where now it’s the opposite. And we’re trying to now build up our road infrastructure as much as we can, because that would be huge to replace all the roads, trying to build up the infrastructure to support these vehicles better.”

“When we’re talking about taking vehicle data, we’re talking about taking and pulling it. But there’s now the ability to push data as well, [for example] warning signs to vehicles, what you would have in the infrastructure getting pushed to the car, instead of just taking, so that’s definitely another really big trend.”

Links: 

Compass IoT 

SCATS (Sydney Coordinated Adaptive Traffic System) 

Connect:

Find the full show notes at: www.mysmart.community 

Connect with Emily via LinkedIn 

Connect with me via email: hello@mysmart.community  

Connect with My Smart Community via LinkedIn or Twitter and watch on YouTube

The Smart Community Podcast is produced by Perk Digital