This week’s Smart City roundup features a contest for smart city solutions, the smartest of bracelets for one hotel’s guests, and fresh capital for a smart parking startup.

Siemen’s smart city contest

Siemens AG’s Road and City Mobility arm announced the launch of its Mobility IDEA (Improving Design and Engineering for All) Contest, an academic initiative to find innovative ideas to help solve five of the toughest challenges facing the traffic industry.

Winners will be invited to participate in a product prototyping workshop with Siemens technology experts. The top three universities with the most submissions will be rewarded with a traffic control software grant worth $150,000 to help train future traffic engineers.

Interested participants can learn more here, where they can also submit their ideas that addresses specific challenges from different scenarios in the traffic industry such as Disaster Response and Resilience, Green Mobility, Downtown Growth, and Parking Nightmare.

The contest is now open and will run through until November 16, 2014, with the finalists to be announced on December 12th.

Pango raises $6.5M in funding

Pango USA LLC, the company behind the smart mobile parking service Pango Mobile Parking, has raised $6.5 million in a Series A funding led by D.H. Rondor International, an online payments innovator.  Adir Inbar of D.H. Rondor will be joining Pango’s Board of Directors.

The round of funding will be used to expand the company’s sales, marketing, and engineering teams in the US and is evaluating opening a new office in Boston where it has already hired talent from the region.

“Pango’s vision is to reach every driver through their mobile or their car in the coming years, offering smart parking and much more,” said Zion Harel, CEO Pango Mobile Parking, in a released statement.

Hotel smart bracelets

Tecnalia Applied Research Centre has developed a technology in collaboration with the Palladium Hotel Group and Paypal Inc. that could greatly revolutionize the hotel experience. Called the the Smart VIB (Very Important Bracelet), what it does is it acts as a guest’s hotel keycard. It’s tied to a guest’s Paypal account, so they can pay for hotel services by simply holding their bracelet up to a reader.

The bracelet is still being developed but the trio believes that it can greatly enhance the hotel experience of guests. If you’ve ever been to Disney World, you may have seen some people sporting colorful, waterproof bands. Called the MagicBand, it acts similarly to the Smart VIB, which means we can only expect that more hotels and resorts will be using this technology in the future.

photo credit: Aristocrats-hat via photopin cc