Alibaba Cloud helps Wuxi's new smart town achieve lift-off

Du Xun, business director of Alibaba Cloud's IoT division, introduces the Feifeng IoT Platform and forecasts the future of Hongshan IoT town at a signing ceremony in Wuxi, Jiangsu province on August 1. [Photo/chinadaliy.com.cn]

The Feifeng platform functions in a similar way to an app store for internet of things developers. Around 500 to 1,000 IoT apps will be built into the platform, according to Ku Wei, general manager of Alibaba Cloud's IoT division, with each of these apps providing a different urban governance solution for the Xinwu government.

The platform will be able to access all the data from the thousands of smart devices and sensors installed across Hongshan. The apps will be designed to interpret this data, and to control the devices based on these insights—for example, to help traffic flow more smoothly by altering the timings of traffic lights at major intersections.

Alibaba Cloud should finish constructing the Feifeng platform in Hongshan by the end of 2017, according to Ku.

The project in Wuxi will also serve as a test case for Alibaba Cloud ahead of its work on the construction of Xiong'an New Area, an ambitious project to build a huge new smart city near Beijing in Hebei province, which was announced by President Xi Jinping in April.