FIWARE Mundus (via the FI-LINKS CSA and the XIFI Project) is now bringing FIWARE to North America with exciting prospects. First a FIWARE Mundus delegation will attend a meeting in Toronto, Canada on 23 March. Several representatives from Canadian public authorities and research initiatives are looking at potentially using FIWARE in addition to a local Canadian platform as foundations for smart cities platforms -a large event is currently being prepared around those ideas for September 2015 in Toronto.

In addition, we will also discuss about potentially federating Canadian nodes with the existing FIWARE nodes. Then an even larger delegation involving Peter Fatelnig from the EC will attend the US Ignite Applications Summit in Washington D.C. from 24 to 27 March. The summit is entitled "Beyond Today's Internet: Experiencing a Smart Future!". US Ignite has shown interest in building a global platform for smart cities applications developers using FIWARE and other platforms e.g. GENI or Docker.

Peter will intervene in a panel during the Summit, and FIWARE will give demos during the exhibition on 25 March. In addition, we will also held private meetings with other public and private organizations (including but not limited to NSF and NIST), once again with the idea of promoting the usage of FIWARE in North America, exchange best practices with our Canadian and US colleagues, and see how we could work further on global smart cities platforms.

Details on the US Ignite Applications Summit can be found here. Information on FIWARE Mundus is now available under the "Communities" tab of the fiware.org web site here. 

Jacques Magen (InterInnov), on behalf of the FI-LINKS and XIFI teams (Federico Alvarez -UPM, Federico Facca -Create-Net and Maurizio Cecchi -Telecom Italia) –and thanks to Peter Fatelnig and Ilkka Lakaniemi for their support in preparing the US visit.