Radical I/O would like to congratulate the winners of the Infrastructure Canada and Impact Canada’s Smart Cities Challenge: the Town of Bridgewater, NS for the $5M prize; Nunavut Communities, NU and the City of Guelph & Wellington County, ON for winning the $10M prizes; and the City of Montreal, QC for winning the $50M prize!

The winning proposals addressed such major themes as health & wellness, poverty, sustainable transportation, and access to food.

The Smart Cities Challenge encourages communities to improve the lives of their citizens through innovation, data, and connected technology. The goal is to help communities become healthier, more inclusive, and sustainable by leveraging open data, integration, transferability, and collaboration.

We have been excitedly following the challenge since its inception in 2018, as Radical I/O shares this vision of promoting connection, collaboration, and using technology to make positive changes in our local and global communities.

We were fortunate to work with one of the finalists, the City of Richmond, on MyRichmond, a personalized web portal for customers to easily access city e-services in one place. The project included multiple software integrations, designing performant APIs, implementing a containerized deployment system, creating search infrastructure, and developing administration tools. The result is the base for an innovative, scalable Smart City solution.

We will soon be partnering with the City and County of Denver (pending contracts) on their exciting, new Smart City initiatives; using technology and data to eliminate silos, optimize city operations, and address some of the their biggest challenges.  

With our own Smart City platform, we are developing a data-driven solution that provides information and insights to meet the real needs of government, citizens, visitors, and businesses. We hope to become the leading software development partner for cities undertaking a Smart City digital transformation.

If you are interested in learning more about our Smart City platform or our custom Smart City technology solutions, let’s connect. We would love to chat over coffee or tea, and show you a demo of our AI-enabled voice app for cities, CityAssistant.

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Radical I/O is a people-first technology consultancy and lab, based entirely in Vancouver, BC. We work with cities and organizations to develop meaningful, data-driven solutions that provide people with easy access to information, when and where they need it. At our core, we remove silos and deliver greater clarity by integrating disparate systems and data sources. We believe in building technology with purpose, and work with our clients to transform their data into information, and ultimately actionable knowledge, through machine learning, dynamic analysis, and user-friendly visualizations for city staff, citizens, visitors and partners. Our agile professional services include strategy, architecture, design, and development with a focus on mobile and web apps, data and IoT, artificial intelligence, virtual and augmented reality, API services, and system integrations. Our smart city software solution intelligently uses data to deliver excellence in online services, planning, and decision-making to improve community livability and increase citizen engagement. Our CityAssistant uses machine learning to give immediate, accurate and consistent answers to city FAQs using voice on smart speakers and text-based chat on web and mobile.