NEW ORLEANS — 360Fuel, a Louisiana-based startup, beat Microsoft, IBM and CGI in LUS Fiber’s first ever Smart City Challenge at the Lafayette Science Museum last weekend.
The Smart City Challenge was a 24-hour reverse-pitch hackathon held on April 26th and 27th, where companies were allowed to participate on an invite-only basis in coming up with a timed solution to a local issue. 360Fuel was awarded more than $10,000 in cash and prizes for ultimately winning the contest.
The problem posed to this year’s competitors was: “With traffic congestion increasing in Lafayette, do we feel safe in public transit? How can we improve transportation so that it may in turn improve our quality of life? How can we as a community come together and solve for traffic congestion and come up with social impact solutions that can lower insurance costs?”
360Fuel’s winning solution was a product called Geaux, a sensor, mobile, cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) driven platform for smart cities. Geaux incentivizes transportation options like carpooling, bike-sharing, bus-riding and walking, while enabling the quickest directions and fastest parking times. Geaux’s application program interface (API) opens enhanced real-time data sets and traffic diversion capabilities to mapping engines and mobile applications like Uber, Waze and Lyft. Geaux’s simple solution paired with LUS's sophisticated infrastructure, paves the way for the implementation of this smart city solution to improving transportation, and provides capability of vehicle to infrastructure (V2I) communications in Lafayette.
360Fuel is an IoT company delivering connected fueling and C-Store retail, started by local Nicholls State University alumnus, Werlien Prosperie III.
