Fresh ideas … and see and be seen
Hub.Berlin is a prominent annual technology and innovation conference held in Berlin, Germany, at Station Berlin near Gleisdreieck, a historically significant railway hub in the center of Berlin. The event is organized by Bitkom, Germany's digital association with more than 2,200 member companies of the digital economy (Bitkom, link), and serves as a platform where professionals, entrepreneurs, and investors come together to explore the latest trends, ideas, and advancements in tech and digital transformation. This year saw politicians like Dr. Volker Wissing, German Federal Minister of Digital and Transport, CEOs like Tim Hoettges of Deutsche Telekom, Adel Al-Saleh, Deutsche Telekom board member and CEO of Deutsche Telekom’s T-Systems subsidiary, and entrepreneurs like Jonas Andrulis, CEO & Founder of AIeph Alpha, a successful German artificial intelligence start up.
Figure 1: Tim Hoettges, CEO Deutsche Telekom, with the sustainability team; and Adel Al-Saleh, CEO of T-Systems with the Catena-X team – Sven Loeffler, Business Owner; Chris Langdon, Agile Product Manager; Tina Boettger, Project Management Office
Digital for sustainability
One key theme of 2023 was sustainability. Deutsche Telekom, leading European telco and parent of T-Mobile, the third largest mobile network in the U.S., dedicated its entire 40-square-meter booth to this urgent topic. The left picture in Figure 1 shows the booth and team: (from left to right): Andreas Schmidt, Ariane Elena Fuchs, Wolfgang Kubink, Chris Schlueter Langdon, Sven Loeffler, Michael Hagspihl, Andreas Schwarzkopf, Nils Pejin, Tim Hoettges, Tim Diekmann, André Beyer, Tina Boettger, Apostolos Sarantidis, Ben Ford, Sarah Malakrah, and Lena Carrasqueira. Our booth exhibited applications for energy efficiency management, circular economy, sustainability reporting, and altogether demonstrated how digital can make a difference for environmental protection and business efficiency.
Figure 2: Dr. Volker Wissing, German Federal Minister for Digital and Transport, with Telekom mobility team members Boettger, Schlueter Langdon, and Carrasqueira
Digital mobility pioneer with dataspace: From RealLabHH to Catena-X
The transport sector is responsible for 30% of greenhouse gas emissions in OECD countries (Tikoudisi et al. 2021) and therefore especially needs to identify solutions to avoid impeding societal costs of climate change. Figure 2 shows Dr. Wissing, German Federal Minister for Digital and Transport, who is responding to the challenge with numerous initiatives as the field’s leading political decision maker. T-Systems and in particular its Telekom Data Intelligence Hub (DIH) tribe, Deutsche Telekom’s primary dataspace unit, is actively driving software development and its commercialization in various initiatives:
- Mobilithek: Modernizing the EU-mandated national access point for mobility data to ensure dataspace connectivity and interoperability (Haase 2022).
- Mobility Data Space (MDS): Upgrading Germany’s first dataspace, which was created by the Merkel administration (Delhar 2020) and continues to receive federal funding (Scholz 2022).
- Catena-X consortium (C-X, link): Contributing to the core dataspace software for the world’s first collaborative and open data ecosystem in the auto industry. C-X is a EUR 250 million software development project with 28 partners that received seed funding of EUR 110 million from the German government (Schlueter Langdon 2021a) and is run in agile fashion following the SAFe method (SAFE, link). Figure 1 shows T-Systems CEO Adel Al-Saleh with Deutsche Telekom’s key C-X leaders: Sven Loeffler, Prof. Dr. Chris Schlueter Langdon, and Tina Boettger.
- Gaia-X 4 Future Mobility, a Gaia-X lighthouse project (Gaia-X4FM, link): A family of six projects funded by the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Climate Protection to develop and implement future mobility applications based on Gaia-X. Chris Schlueter Langdon is head of one project (Gaia-X 4 Advanced Mobility Services) and lead of dataspace in another (Gaia-X 4 Artificial Intelligence).
- RealLab Hamburg of the National Platform Future of Mobility (NPM, link): We pioneered application of a dataspace to enable an initial interactive intermodal travel planning demonstrator for the visitors of the 2021 ITS World Congress in Hamburg.
Lessons learned
Learn more from our pioneering dataspace projects:
- 3 steps for strategy: T-Systems White Paper part 1, link
- 3 steps for operations: T-Systems White Paper part 2, link
Referenzen
Delhaes, D. 2020. Merkel drängt Autokonzerne: BMW, Daimler und VW sollen Datenschatz teilen. Handelsblatt (2020-10-28), link
Haase, T. 2022. Mobilithek goes mobile. Future Practice Magazine, Issue 02/2022, T-Systems, Frankfurt, link
RealLabHH. 2022. Wir verändern Mobilität – Erkenntnisse des Reallabors Hamburg für eine digitale Mobilität von morgen. Abschlussbericht (2022-04), RealLab Hamburg, Hamburg, link (super-app chapter only: link )
Schlueter Langdon, C. 2021a. Catena-X for GAIA-X: Will Data Space Be the Word of 2021? Blog (2021-03-03), International Data Spaces Association, Berlin, link
Schlueter Langdon, C. 2021b. Dataspace Enabled Mobility. In: Mertens, C., et al. (eds.). Data Move People. Anthology (version 1.0, October), International Data Spaces Association, Berlin, Germany: 27-41, link
Schlueter Langdon, C. and Eckert, J. 2022. Intermodal travel super app with agent system and data space: RealLab Hamburg implementation. Scientific Paper ID 1225984, 28th ITS World Congress, Los Angeles, link
Schlueter Langdon, C., N. Oehrlein, and D. Kerinnis. 2021. Integrated Public Transport: Quantifying user benefits – Example of Hamburg. Technical Paper ID 438, 27th ITS World Congress, Hamburg, link
Scholz, O. 2022. Rede von Bundeskanzler Olaf Scholz zur Festveranstaltung der Deutschen Akademie der Technikwissenschaften am 18. Oktober 2022 in Berlin. Bulletin der Bundesregierung Nr. 134-1 (21. Oktober), link
Tikoudisi, I, L. Martinezii, K. Farrowi, C-G Bouyssouiii, O. Petrikii, and W. Oueslatii. 2021. Exploring the impact of shared mobility services on CO2. OECD Environment Working Papers, No. 175, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/9d20da6c-en
