Twenty-thousand dollars will be up for grabs at the Smart Cities Gigabit Reverse Pitch event Friday at the Charles W. Eisemann Center for Performing Arts in Richardson.

The event is part of the US Ignite’s Smart Cities Gigabit Communities program. The city of Richardson is one of 22 cities participating in the program, and one of nine that has accepted the “smart gigabit city” app development challenge.

“It is a challenge that we are putting out to our greater North Texas community inviting people from the university and technology ecosystem to come and try to develop applications based upon an infrastructure that we will explain,” said Mike Skelton, director of the Mayor’s Office of International Business Development. 

” … we are going to take the university as a subset of the community and test out the winning proposals.”
MIKE SKELTON

Participants will learn the goals of the project at the start of the event and then come up with an idea or business plan based on the resources and materials available at the competition.  

The competition, open to local entrepreneurs, university researchers, developers, and startups, will focus on the University of Texas at Dallas campus and the technological advancements that can be made there using gigabit applications.

“Rather than trying to deploy this out over the city, we are going to take the university as a subset of the community and test out the winning proposals,” Skelton said.   

The Smart Cities Gigabit Reverse Pitch is being funded by recent grants from the National Science Foundation’s US Ignite initiative. The grants also will provide training programs for the development of Smart Gigabit Cities applications throughout the year.

IF YOU GO

When: Feb. 24, 11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Where: Charles W. Eisemann Center for Performing Arts, Bank of America Hall, 2351 Performance Drive, in Richardson.
Cost: Free. For more information or to register, visit the city’s website. Registration closes Feb. 22.