Eemspoort has a first for Groningen: This business park is the first city-district with wireless internet. Since a few days the Wifi-system is on air, thanks to an antenna on the roof of network expert Mediacaster, itself located at Eemspoort.

This report summarises the e-government context in Groningen, based on interviews with staff from the city, and identifies factors that they feel shape their local e-government context and their involvement in the Smart Cities project.

The 24th and 25th of March 2011 a lively workshop on the businessmodels for Wireless services was held in Groningen. The main goal was to determine the drivers and pitfalls for a successful and sustainable wireless city.

Smart Cities project partners, technologists, planners and municipal representatives from across the North Sea Region are meeting in Groningen today and tomorrow to discuss different approaches to developing wireless services and the business cases that are necessary to make these solutions work.

Many cities are planning to implement a WIFI network. During this workshop from Smart Cities, we will highlight a few cases and try to extract the success and fail factors that are driving the business case for wireless netwoorks in urban areas. New developments and business opportunities will be discussed.

The Smart Cities project is entering the last year of the project. On the steering committee in Groningen, the partners defined a timing for the last year of the project.

The Groningen Municipality is teaming up with the University of Groningen to determine if its e-services satisfy citizens’ service expectations. After the online surveys of the City of Kortrijk, a survey on services by Memori in five municipalities in the Kortrijk region and the surveys in Osterholz-Scharmbeck, this is again a Smart Cities initiative on participation, measuring and co-design.

Mobile use of the internet is on the rise. Groningen now has the ability to monitor its website on the use of mobile devices. Since the start of this analysis-tool (part of Google analytics) on Nov 3rd 2009, the Groningen website was visited by more than 5500 mobile visitors. Daily, between 20 and 70 mobile users visit our website.

On Monday 1 March 2010 the alderman for Economic Affairs Jaap Dijkstra received the ‘Certificate for Good Services’ at the Ministry of Economic Affairs in the Hague. This Certificate summarizes the results and main areas for improvement of a municipality’s services for businesses.

The Smart Cities partners will create six pilots on mobile services in 2010. This is the result of a workshop on wireless services in Groningen. The partners will work on tourism, parking and library services, and will exchange methodologies to build mobile services. Check also the video.