Bright Innovations: Bright Lights Way to Smart and Connected Cities of Future

The dual trend of rapid urbanization and advances in technology are giving rise to “smart cities” around the world. The intention of a smart city is two-fold. Firstly, it aims to address the challenges of efficiently maintaining essential services—water, power, healthcare, and emergency services, with new technological solutions. Secondly, it aims to encourage the proliferation of new high-tech services to the broader population. When designing a smart city, the prospect of a single-point control to integrate, connect, and manage multiple services is definitely an enticing option, and this is where Bright Innovations comes into play. The Israel-based smart city and IoT solutions developer and provider gives future smart cities the opportunity to engage in comprehensive and holistic planning across their security, safety, and operational needs. The magnitude and complexity of communication within a smart city, with human-to-human, human-to-device, and device-to-device interactions, is hard to fully understand, even by the most forward-thinking cities. Bright Innovations’ platform enables these cities to take one big step forward in the challenge to understand, control, analyze, and interpret this explosion of data.

The firm brings to the fore a visionary open smart city platform—Coral Reef—that provides application developers with access to Bright’s cloud-based communication and computation platform. “Coral Reef’s advanced processing and communications system provide connectivity between numerous applications and users, ensuring that products and services reach consumers efficiently and securely,” says Rami Mirsky, CEO and Founder of Bright Innovations.

Similar to coral reefs the platform relies on a home, and the firm believes that street lighting infrastructure is the ideal location for the Coral Reef to inhabit and proliferate from. The platform serves as a base for IoT services and online street applications and allows municipalities to accomplish the goal of “Connected Streets”. Bright embeds its smart Coral Reef ‘engine’ units into street lights, with advanced communications and processing capabilities. The platform features a unique ‘App Store’ with a cloud-based data center for third-party applications and a ‘Gateway’ for application developers and users with advanced control and monitoring features.

With the vision of integrating apps and services with street infrastructure, Bright Innovations has effectively developed an “App store of the Outdoors”. “The growing trend of replacing legacy streetlights with energy efficient LED streetlight provides an opportunity for Bright to deploy its open smart city platform,” says Mirsky. The platform provides an opportunity for a huge number of smart city applications and assists in collection and analysis in cloud-based data repositories.
With the help of cloud-based data transfer, end-users can utilize the data transferred to the servers for varied applications such as navigation, parking, homeland security, smart cars connectivity, and more. “Networked street lights are more than mere appliances for artificial lighting, they are nodes in a multi-functional network,” explains Mirsky. For instance, sensors and cameras deployed on streetlights can collect and transmit data from surrounding parking spots for the system to determine whether a spot is occupied or not. This data can significantly reduce the time and effort people averagely spend on finding a parking spot; and appropriate sensors can register a car to automate the billing process. Bright Innovation’s Coral Reef platform employs advanced big data, and edge-computing technologies. The system’s edge computing capabilities alleviate network congestion and enables cutting-edge Artificial Intelligence capabilities.

Bright Innovations has deployed and is handling the first energy-saving, connected street lighting projects in Israel. Moving ahead, the company plans to step into Asian markets to expand its footprint by partnering in China, Singapore, Australia, and other locations. Bright Innovations is planning to establish an Australian company and to list on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) in 2018. Bright has also established a subsidiary in China to better collaborate with leading system integrators and technology companies of the region.