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A team from 360Fuel, a startup incubated at the Opportunity Machine, beat out seasoned world-class stalwarts IBM, Microsoft and CGI at LUS Fiber’s first-ever Smart City Challenge.

The competition was held at the Lafayette Science Museum during a 24-hour reverse-pitch hackathon on April 26 and 27, during Festival International de Louisiane. All competing teams were invited by LUS Fiber.
360Fuel brought home the grand prize of $10,000 by creating an app that best addressed challenges which dealt with Lafayette’s traffic congestion and the consequences to those who live here:

• With traffic congestion increasing in Lafayette, do we feel safe in public transport?
• How can we improve transportation so that it may in turn improve our quality of life?
• How can the community unite to remedy traffic congestion and come up with social impact solutions that lower insurance costs?

The smart phone app created by the 360Fuel team is called ‘Geaux,’ a sensor-, mobile-, cloud-, and artificial intelligence-driven platform that works only in Smart Cities. The app incentivizes activities – carpooling, bike-sharing, riding the bus and walking – that reduce the number of vehicles on the road. It finds ways around heavy traffic and helps locate a parking space more quickly.

Geaux’s API – application program interface – opens enhanced real-time data sets and traffic diversion capabilities to mapping engines and mobile applications like Uber, Waze and Lyft.
Geaux’s solution – paired with LUS Fiber’s infrastructure – improves transportation and enhance vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications in Lafayette.