The European Commission has announced a new €365 million a year innovation partnership scheme aimed at boosting the development of ‘smart’ technologies in cities, EU officials told the press on Tuesday (10 July).
For 2013, €365 million in EU funds have been earmarked for the development of urban technology.
The European Innovation Partnership (EIP) will see private business and the EU executive pool research from energy, transport and ICT to develop a limited number of approved projects.
Examples of mooted projects included silent electric city buses that use digital technology, satellite technology aimed at improving traffic flow, a smartphone applications for reserving alternative fuel rental vehicles, and fast charging mechanisms for electric vehicles.
The EU communication on the scheme said improving the efficiency and sustainability of European cities was a vital commitment for 2020 targets since urban areas consume 70% of the EU’s energy, while about 1% of the entire region’s GDP goes towards congestion costs.
Research and innovation
EU Commission Vice President Siim Kallas, who is responsible for transport, called for urban research and innovation since “Europe’s cities suffer most from road accidents, congestion, poor air quality and noise” compared with rural areas.
Neelie Kroes, Commission vice president responsible for the Digital Agenda, also mentioned “tiny sensors that harvest energy from the environment and smarten up our clothes, our cars, streets and the wider world around”, adding that this was “no science fiction”.
Under the goals of the ‘smart cities’ partnership, Kroes said that at this moment in time, “most cities are probably ‘dumb’,” underlining the Commission’s drive to ease traffic, cut energy waste and reduce emissions.
“Smart cities are green cities”, she said, adding that advances needed to be made in reducing ICT’s environmental footprint, which she said some estimated as accounting for 8% to 10% of electricity consumption.
Calls for ‘smart city’ proposals dovetail with other Commission innovation drives, including a ‘future and emerging technologies’ programme that will provide €1 billion in funding over 10 years. Among the projects in the pipeline are domestic ‘slave’ robots and nano materials that record minute fluctuations in body behaviour.
'Not overnight'
Kroes said introducing new technologies to cities could take some time, due to “strong vested interests, and a resistance to breaking down barriers” in sectors like ICT, transport, energy, healthcare and waste management.
Companies were sometimes disinclined or could not afford to take big risks in overhauling their current systems, she said.
The Commission EIP communication also said that Europe had scarce resources for experimentation, and stressed it would be looking at the projects that were most cost-effective.
This, the statement said, would mean reusing and finding multiple uses for existing infrastructure, especially since current systems were likely to be surpassed or made redundant by newer technologies in the coming years.
Analyzing one of American corporate history’s greatest mysteries—the lost decade of Microsoft—two-time George Polk Award winner (and V.F.’s newest contributing editor) Kurt Eichenwald traces the “astonishingly foolish management decisions” at the company that “could serve as a business-school case study on the pitfalls of success.” Relying on dozens of interviews and internal corporate records—including e-mails between executives at the company’s highest ranks—Eichenwald offers an unprecedented view of life inside Microsoft during the reign of its current chief executive, Steve Ballmer, in the August issue. Today, a single Apple product—the iPhone—generates more revenue than all of Microsoft’s wares combined.
Eichenwald’s conversations reveal that a management system known as “stack ranking”—a program that forces every unit to declare a certain percentage of employees as top performers, good performers, average, and poor—effectively crippled Microsoft’s ability to innovate. “Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed—every one—cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees,” Eichenwald writes. “If you were on a team of 10 people, you walked in the first day knowing that, no matter how good everyone was, 2 people were going to get a great review, 7 were going to get mediocre reviews, and 1 was going to get a terrible review,” says a former software developer. “It leads to employees focusing on competing with each other rather than competing with other companies.”
When Eichenwald asks Brian Cody, a former Microsoft engineer, whether a review of him was ever based on the quality of his work, Cody says, “It was always much less about how I could become a better engineer and much more about my need to improve my visibility among other managers.” Ed McCahill, who worked at Microsoft as a marketing manager for 16 years, says, “You look at the Windows Phone and you can’t help but wonder, How did Microsoft squander the lead they had with the Windows CE devices? They had a great lead, they were years ahead. And they completely blew it. And they completely blew it because of the bureaucracy.”
According to Eichenwald, Microsoft had a prototype e-reader ready to go in 1998, but when the technology group presented it to Bill Gates he promptly gave it a thumbs-down, saying it wasn’t right for Microsoft. “He didn’t like the user interface, because it didn’t look like Windows,” a programmer involved in the project recalls.
“The group working on the initiative was removed from a reporting line to Gates and folded into the major-product group dedicated to software for Office,” Eichenwald reports. “Immediately, the technology unit was reclassified from one charged with dreaming up and producing new ideas to one required to report profits and losses right away.” “Our entire plan had to be moved forward three to four years from 2003–04, and we had to ship a product in 1999,” says Steve Stone, a founder of the technology group. “We couldn’t be focused anymore on developing technology that was effective for consumers. Instead, all of a sudden we had to look at this and say, ‘How are we going to use this to make money?’”
A former official in Microsoft’s Office division tells Eichenwald that the death of the e-reader effort was not simply the consequence of a desire for immediate profits. The real problem for his colleagues was the touch screen: “Office is designed to inputting with a keyboard, not a stylus or a finger,” the official says. “There were all kinds of personal prejudices at work.” According to Microsoft executives, the company’s loyalty to Windows and Office repeatedly kept them from jumping on emerging technologies. “Windows was the god—everything had to work with Windows,” Stone tells Eichenwald. “Ideas about mobile computing with a user experience that was cleaner than with a P.C. were deemed unimportant by a few powerful people in that division, and they managed to kill the effort.”
When one of the young developers of MSN Messenger noticed college kids giving status updates on AOL’s AIM, he saw what Microsoft’s product lacked. “That was the beginning of the trend toward Facebook, people having somewhere to put their thoughts, a continuous stream of consciousness,” he tells Eichenwald. “The main purpose of AIM wasn’t to chat, but to give you the chance to log in at any time and check out what your friends were doing.” When he pointed out to his boss that Messenger lacked a short-message feature, the older man dismissed his concerns; he couldn’t see why young people would care about putting up a few words. “He didn’t get it,” the developer says. “And because he didn’t know or didn’t believe how young people were using messenger programs, we didn’t do anything.”
“I see Microsoft as technology’s answer to Sears,” said Kurt Massey, a former senior marketing manager. “In the 40s, 50s, and 60s, Sears had it nailed. It was top-notch, but now it’s just a barren wasteland. And that’s Microsoft. The company just isn’t cool anymore.”
“They used to point their finger at IBM and laugh,” said Bill Hill, a former Microsoft manager. “Now they’ve become the thing they despised.”
If Twitter ads really take off, it will be because CEO Dick Costolo will have figured out how to sell lots of little ads to small marketers, in the same way Google did more than a decade ago. In the meantime, the company seems to be succeeding with the other end of the spectrum: Big marketers interested in experimenting with a brand-new format.
Last year, Twitter ad boss Adam Bain made a point of targeting big brands like Pepsi and American Express. And this year he’s seeing some of that work pay off, as some of them are committing to campaigns that will run for much of 2012.
Twitter won’t talk publicly about its ad-selling efforts. But you can get a glimpse of what they’re doing via a pitch deck the company recently used to woo a big publicly traded company. We’re not going to show you all of it here, primarily because some of the slides identified the would-be advertiser*. But you can still get a pretty good sense of it.
A few notes in advance:
Twitter is still doing lots of basic explaining about what it is and how it works: Yes, people still use Twitter to talk about their breakfast. But it’s important for Bain et al to explain that people use Twitter to pass along lots of other stuff, too: Rallying cries (like the #Jan25 hashtag during Egypt’s revolution of 2011), cool images (like Stefanie Gordon’s groggy space shuttle pix) or celebrity smackdowns (Drake v. T. Boone Pickens). Big idea: Your brand could be one of those things people share on Twitter, too!
Spend enough and Twitter will offer you all kinds of goodies. Just like any other big ad company, Twitter offers white glove treatment for its most important customers, and it hints at some of this in the “Joint Business Plans” slide: Early looks at new ad products, help coming up with new campaigns, custom events, etc. The part where Twitter promises to provide all kinds of “analytics” might be particularly relevant for some of the third party companies that do the same stuff.
Spend enough and Twitter will let you spend less. That same slide mentions “key discounts,” detailed on an “investment grid.” I’m not reprinting that one, but am happy to tell you what’s in there: Twitter says it will knock 10 percent off the rate card for anyone who ponies up more than $6 million a year (An earlier version of this post incorrectly reported that number as $6,000). Again, standard issue for any big ad business. But always interesting to see spelled out.
One other item I’m not reprinting (again for the reason explained above): A slide where Twitter says it has plans to roll out “enhanced interest targeting” for its core Promoted Tweet product.
In English: Right now, Twitter only offers advertisers a handful of crude tools when they want to slice up their target audience, but it has promised in the past that those would get more refined. The company isn’t offering a timetable for the new tools (at least not in the slides I’ve seen), but it’s confident enough about them to start talking them up to would-be buyers.
Viruses and malware are no longer threats that are limited to computers, with more electronic devices, such as smartphones and tablets, going online. UK-based Ocean Blue Software and Sophos have just developed what could be the world's first antivirus program for smart TVs. This cloud-based solution can be rolled out as a part of Ocean Blue's security suite or directly integrated into the panel's own software system.
This is a timely introduction considering the growing popularity of smart TVs, which support downloadable apps and Web-surfing functions. Such antivirus software may also bolster users' confidence for e-commerce and other applications that require input of personal information through these Internet-ready panels.
LinkedIn has confirmed that some of its users' passwords have been compromised and said it is continung to investigate claims that a member of a Russian online forum hacked the popular networking site and uploaded close to 6.5 million passwords to the internet.
In a blog post issued late Wednesday afternoon, LinkedIn said the passwords of users whose data had been compromised would no longer work, and they would be sent emails advising them how to change them. It would not say how many passwords had been leaked.
The passwords were allegedly uploaded encrypted and without usernames since the hacker's aim seems to have been to demonstrate that the LinkedIn site is not secure rather than to use the personal information of its users.
But according to The Verge technology news website, which broke the news, the encryption used is not foolproof, leaving open the possibility that the passwords could be accessed by someone else.
The Verge reported that some LinkedIn users have found hashed versions of their passwords on the uploaded list and recommended that all LinkedIn users change their passwords as a precaution.
The company itself included a reminder about best practices with regard to passwords in a blog post about its investigation of the possible password leak.
"One of the best ways to protect your privacy and security online is to craft a strong password, to change it frequently (at least once a quarter or every few months) and to not use the same password on multiple sites," LinkedIn product manager Vicente Silveira wrote.
"Use this as an opportunity to review all of your account settings on LinkedIn and on other sites, too."
LinkedIn is a popular site where professionals post profiles in order to network with others in their field, look for jobs or as a way of advertising themselves to potential employers. As of November 2011, it had 131 million users and more than one million groups.
2nd security headache this week
The latest news comes just as the company is addressing security concerns about its mobile app for iPhones and Android smartphones, which syncs information in your phone calendar with LinkedIn profiles to provide details about people you are meeting at events listed in your calendar.
Earlier this week, it was reported that the app was collecting all of the details entered into the phone's calendar functions, including passcodes, emails, meeting notes or private phone numbers for teleconferences that were never intended to be shared, and transmitting the information to the company's servers. Concerns were raised that this might violate users' privacy.
The company responded by saying the calendar sync function is an opt-in feature that users have to agree to and that the information is transmitted securely and never stored or shared. Nevertheless, it did alter the app and will now no longer send data from the meeting notes section of calendar events to its servers during the syncing process.
Globally, there are some 700 cities, each with population exceeding 500,000 and are growing faster than the average growth rate of cities. This opens up the market for industry players to grow their business in new and emerging smart cities. The infrastructure investment for these cities is forecasted to be $30 trillion to $40 trillion, cumulatively, over the next 20 years.
With growing emphasis on reducing carbon emission and the fact that conventional cities form a major source of CO2 emission, planning a smart city becomes a viable option for governments and municipal authorities. Deploying technologies such as smart grids, smart metering for energy management; electric vehicle and traffic management with smart transportation and smart security are high growth areas within smart cities.
The overall smart cities market, valued at $526.3 billion in 2011, is forecasted to grow double fold to $1,023.4 billion by 2016, at a CAGR of 14.2% for the period 2011 to 2016. Among all application segments, we observe smart energy or energy management market to be the fastest growing market with an impressive CAGR of 28.7%, growing to $80.7 billion by 2016.
In addition to market sizes and forecasts, the report also provides a detailed analysis of the market trends and factors influencing market growth, offering in-depth geographic analyses of the smart cities market in North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and ROW.
Along with the special coverage of 18 ongoing key smart cities project, the report also draws the competitive landscape of the smart cities market, providing an in-depth comparative analysis of the technological and marketing strategies that the key players are adopting in order to gain an edge over their competitors.
The BlackBerry phone maker moves forward with a big international push with plans to open retail shops in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and possibly Africa.
With slumping sales in the West, Research In Motion has plans to go to the East. The BlackBerry maker is in the process of opening retail stores throughout the Middle East starting in Dubai, according to Bloomberg.
"We're getting the first one up and running and then we'll be looking at other cities across the Middle East -- Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar," Sandeep Saihgal, the managing director of RIM's Middle East business, told Bloomberg in an interview earlier this week.
The Dubai store in the United Arab Emirates will be the flagship shop and Bloomberg reports it will be in a 1,500-square-foot space. Additional stores partnering with a local company -- Axiom Telecom -- are also planned across the region.
The relationship between RIM and the UAE has a slightly rocky past. In 2010, during a drawn-out saga, the Middle Eastern government said it would block e-mail, instant messaging, and Web browsing on BlackBerry devices unless RIM came in line with UAE telecommunications regulations. Days before the ban was to be enforced, the two parties reached an agreement.
RIM is reportedly looking to venture into other international regions besides the Middle East, including Asia and Africa, according to Bloomberg. The company announced in February that it was planning to open 4,000 retail outlets in Indonesia and possibly more across Southeast Asia.
There is a much higher demand for BlackBerry phones in these regions than in the West, according to Bloomberg. Shipments of the device to the Middle East and Africa more than doubled in the fourth quarter of 2011, compared with a year prior.
For all the talk of the Apple [AAPL] adventures in mobile and the consumer product focus of the iDevice/iTunes combo, it's dead easy to neglect some of the more world-changing implementations of mobile technology. In tandem with the nascent Machine-to-machine (M2M) industry and the drive to smart cities, smartphones are already changing the world.
iPhone in Agriculture
Look at that video above. It dates from 2009 and shows LoadOut Technologies' iPhone-based grain-loading controls in action. The iPhone here is controlling just how much grain is loaded onto those big trucks. Which is cool in a "look at me I've got a robot" kind of a way, but there's more.
In South Korea this year, melon farmers are installing monitoring systems in 1,000 geographically-dispersed greenhouses. These monitoring systems can be controlled remotely and allow farmers to control feed, watch growth, water plants and more. Greenhouses can be many miles away from a farmer's HQ, so these systems -- accessible via a smartphone or PC -- will deliver real productivity advantages. Or at least give early-rising agriculturalists the chance to take a nap.
A firm called Trimble produces a range of remotely-controlled devices which allow farmers centralized monitoring of seeding systems. These controls aren't just about casting your seed, they're also keeping an eye on growth and more. And because they can be controlled via a Web interface, an iPhone (or other device) suddenly becomes a tool for making the food you eat. I think that's pretty interesting, and hope you do, too.
These are all fascinating solutions as machine-to -machine technologies impact agriculture. These solutions are especially useful in developing economies, where mobile phone use extends to maybe 50 percent of the population (ITU) while fixed broadband and telephony reaches a fraction of that.
This is why 3G networks are springing up across these territories, as infrastructure managers recognize the potential for mobile broadband to deliver significant savings in terms of the cost of installation of fixed systems.
It's good for farmers, too, who, let's face it, are under constant pressure by the big supermarket brands to deliver crops at prices they can't afford to deliver them at. Perhaps, just perhaps, such productivity improvements will help some independent farmers resist the inevitable move toward completely centralized control of food production.
iPhone in Medicine
The iPhone's impact on healthcare's pretty widely-known. There's already over 12,000 health-related apps for Apple devices (Mobile Health News). And hospitals across the planet are installing intelligent patient monitoring systems, including 159 of 164 Houston Healthcare hospitals. Such systems offer real-time machine test read-outs to monitoring stations, allow patient access to multimedia, entertainment and up-to-the minute patient records.
It goes much further: In the UK, City University and The Stroke Association are testing iPad/Wii apps to allow stroke victims suffering aphasia (which affects 250,000 in the UK) to communicate with gestures.
There's a few other interesting nuggets I've come across while researching this little slice of "we're already in the Jetsons" prose:
-- 98 percent of US physicians already use mobile solutions (Spyglass).
-- 79 percent of doctors prefer the iPad (Aptilon).
The end result?
The installed base of M2M-connected healthcare devices will exceed 774 million by 2020. (Machina Research). And there's a pretty good chance, given the medical industry preference for the secure walled garden offered by Apple products, that iPhones (and iPads, obviously) will be part of this mix. One system I read about consists of a watch, worn by the patient, that on the press of a single help button will send emails, voice calls and SMS messages to an entire medical team, escalating the contacts reached to scale with the severity of the emergency. These solutions can boost response times to patient emergency and save lives.
And don't even get me started talking about the value of the 'Find My iPhone' feature to families trying to trace the movement of a straying Alzheimer's patient (assuming they're carrying the thing). According to Omnilink systems, 50 percent of Alzheimer's patients will die or become injured if they aren't found within 24-hours.
That's a pretty big ripple effect for the product, don't you think? The potential to help save lives. What else can it do?
iPhone at War
Death they say is life's twin. We all -- to a greater or a lesser extent -- allow our fear of our own mortality to inform our relationships with those around us, ourselves, and the external world.
We can't help ourselves. We're human. We want to be here and in most cases the omnipresence of the great taboo makes us feel a little anxious. And that's alright. We're built that way. But, sadly and in common with the existential truth at the heart of humanity, you can use an iPhone to save lives, and take them, too. I prefer the first use, others see value in the second.
It began small. Way back in May 2009 it was revealed the US Army was using the iPhone and iPod touch as communication/translation devices to help communicate with locals.
At that time the Marine Corps was working on a bunch of app-based iPhone solutions to enable soldiers to upload images of captives to a central database. These things are being used to guide bomb-disabling robots and to view remote video from drones.
Later that year, US defense giant, Raytheon, introduced a range of iPhone apps, such as One Force Tracker (OFT) software lets soldiers track whereabouts of allies and adversaries on maps in real time.
Warfare projects hit a wall of course because defense chiefs want to be able to use iPhones on secured private communication networks (specifically the DOD's Global Information Grid), rather than on those hackable and unreliable consumer networks, which are probably disabled during a warfare situation anyway.
Then last year the Defense Department -- via the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) -- began to authorize the use of Android and iPhone software militarywide, reports the Air Force Times.
Also last year, Boeing and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology commenced development of an iPhone app that may one day be used by the US military to fly unmanned aerial vehicles, InformationWeek reported.
And in future? It isn't so hard to imagine M2M technology being used to control and maneuver battlefield systems en masse, as the age of Robot Wars seems closer each day. (Don't believe me, just look at the video above concerning Tactical Nav, which uses GPS and the iPhone camera to chart coordinates and guide artillery fire.)
So there's three ways the iPhone is changing the way we live today: the food we eat; healing the sick; and making war. These impacts have taken just five years to evolve. This is only a beginning.
Building a better LTE phone will help RIM. But it also stands a good chance of improving its standing outside North America if it applies the right strategy. "We should not forget that RIM is still very strong in some emerging markets -- South Africa, Indonesia, etc.," writes Stela Bokun, an analyst with Pyramid Research .
In Latin America, Bokun points out that RIM had a good year in 2010, but a bad year in 2011. The market is so volatile, she writes, "that one killer app can make … or kill a company."
RIM gained some 10 percentage points of market share in Latin America in 2010, largely on the strength of its BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) application. It couldn't sustain that momentum the following year, but Bokun's point is that the possibility does exist that RIM could catch some emerging markets with the right idea at the right time and tremendously improve its business in a very short space of time.
What if, for instance, RIM launched a lower-end, less expensive line of handsets for some Southeast Asian markets and BBM -- or something else -- caught on?
What is clear is that RIM won't win on price alone in those markets. Oppenheimer & Co. Inc. analyst Ittai Kidron recently mentioned, in a note to clients, that "there is increasing risk to RIM's international business in emerging markets as more Android vendors go down the price curve."
Chinese vendors are the most price competitive, Kidron notes, and Android phones in the US$100 to $150 price range offer an "attractive alternative to RIM's value priced Curve 8630, which has been a strong seller internationally for RIM."
So where do we leave this topic? Right back where we found it. "All in all, I don’t think it’s 'game over' for RIM, despite the fact that it doesn’t have too many lives left," Bokun writes.
OpenTouch Conversation will enable users to switch between voice calls, IM and video conferencing without interruptions.
Alcatel-Lucent's OpenTouch Conversation software will allow enterprise users to switch among different ways of communicating -including instant messaging, voice calls and video conferencing - without interrupting their conversations. The software will first be available on Apple's iPad, the company said on Monday.
The concept of integrating different ways of communicating is far from new, and is often called unified communications in the enterprise market. But products need to become much simpler for the sector to take off on a grander scale, according to Craig Walker, director of product marketing at Alcatel-Lucent's enterprise group.
That ease-of-use is what Alcatel-Lucent hopes it will achieve with OpenTouch Conversation.
On the iPad screen, a user can see a graphical timeline of recent, current and future conversations, pictures of their current key contacts and a "stage" where their current conversations takes place, according to Alcatel-Lucent. Presence information on the availability of their contacts is also visible, it said.
By clicking on the screen, users will be able to switch from a chat session to a voice conversation or a video conference.
Users will eventually also be able to start a voice call on an office phone, move the conversation to a video conference on a PC or tablet and then conclude it on a mobile phone, according to Alcatel-Lucent.
Alcatel-Lucent intends to make the OpenTouch Conversation client app available on iPhones, Macs, Windows PCs as well as Android-based tablets and smartphones based on both Android and BlackBerry OS.
"We were hoping to use just HTML5, so the client would be immediately portable between different operating systems, but it isn't ready yet," said Walker.
The plan is now to make the iPad client - which will be compatible with the 2048-by-1536 pixel resolution on the new iPad - available in June, followed by clients for PCs, Macs later during the year.
A client compatible with Android-tablets and Android-based smartphones will arrive in the beginning of next year, according to Walker. The application for the iPhone will be available for download at the end of the year or in the beginning of 2013.
All the clients will have the same design, Walker said.
For the OpenTouch Conversation clients to work, an enterprise would also need an OpenTouch server, which, in turn, can be integrated with telephony switches from other vendors.
The company didn't announce any pricing, but enterprises will pay per user and communications technology. For example, a company may have a thousand employees, but only pay for 200 of them to be able to use video conferencing, Walker said.
Smart Cities Miss Key Benefits When Telecommunications Service Providers Lack a Key RoleDoes it make sense that telecommunications service providers (SPs) are not playing a critical role in projects to create smart cities? The facts of the matter are that involvement still remains limited. This is true even though telecommunications itself plays a central role. As a result, telecom SPs compete with cable companies, utilities and other service providers in an effort to provide information and communications technology (ICT) and other services.
Reality is that this competition can create a disconnect in the delivery of valuable services, limiting the reach and capabilities of the resulting smart city.
A recent posting by Alcatel-Lucent "Getting Smart About Smart Cities About Smart Cities,” highlights the importance of leveraging key assets within telecommunications service provider infrastructures to partner with key players in the creation of smart cities using IMS solutions to leverage the migration to end-to-end IP networks. In doing so, these providers significantly change their role from facilitators to strategic partners with key industries and governments in the development of these projects. To gain a better understanding of the current environment and process to develop smart cities, the Alcatel-Lucent Market and Consumer Insight team conducted a three-part analysis of 52 smart cities in 2011. This process included examining smart cities from two angles:
- Key stakeholders and their contribution to concepts and realization
- The impact these stakeholders influenced development
The study revealed that the value propositions for most initiatives involving smart cities do not position Information and Communications Technology (ICT) as key to the value of smart city (and smart grid in general) projects. In addition, they found that the implementation of the necessary capabilities tends to be determined mostly by the motivations of those driving the project and hence not having telecom SPs at the table from the start can be problematic.
A vast ecosystem of key players is at the center of smart city projects, the players include those from multiple disciplines within government entities and representatives from small to large multinational business firms. Governments tend to start the projects for creating smart cities with vendor playing a somewhat background role. And, the study found that these scenarios can create their complications.
While relationships develop among stakeholders involved with smart cities projects, it is not clear how these relationships are created or maintained over the life of a project. This is a classic case of the famous Nelson Mandela quote, “Where one stands depends upon where one sat.” Each project is driven by a multitude of motivations and interests. These include such things as the need to invent or construct a new economic model, the need or wish to reduce energy consumption, or the need to improve the environment of city life.
For telecom and other SPs to find their role in the process and demonstrate the value they bring to the table, it’s critical that they understand how the development of smart cities impacts all other players. This means clear demonstration of the value of critical infrastructure elements as evolving 4G LTE (News - Alert) with integrated and/or predominant Wi-Fi access, along with how to leverage IMS. It also means a clear articulation of how using the vast array of mobile solutions for the key machine-to-machine (M2M) capabilities that are core to smart grids, and making the case as to how, what, when, where and why the planning, deployment and maintenance of such capabilities, are essential to project success. As the ALU posting observes, breaking through some of the ambiguous relationships, motivations and other elements can identify clear patterns for constructing the right strategy for involvement. And, as previously mentioned, telecom SPs must communicate that value of involvement with key stakeholders to ensure them not just a significant seat at the table from project start, but the centrality of their value-added from concept to project completion and beyond. In short, telecom SPs need to change the conversation so that they are involved early and often.
Isn’t it amazing that today half of the world’s population lives in cities, and just a few decades from now, more than three out of four people will call a city “home”? At the beginning of last century, the number of mega-cities worldwide could be counted on the fingers of one hand. But within some decades, adding the toes of our feet will not be enough to count them.
This growing concentration of people in cities will lead to constraints, new needs and additional pressure on the cities’ various systems. That’s why Jane Anderson, Debbie Fisher and I, all members of the Market and Consumer Insight (MCI) team within Alcatel-Lucent, were asked to study smart cities — and consider related market opportunities.
Research phases
Our 2011 research included the following phases.
We first reviewed studies undertaken by key stakeholders in smart cities and looked at 18 smart city projects in order to better understand the players, the processes and the focus of vendors and service providers.
Next, students from the EDHEC Business School of Nice joined us for a deeper dive into seven smart city projects. “Persons of interest” in these projects helped us grasp the business models, funding, and engagement models that manage complex relationships among players.
Finally, we substantiated the smart city types and the initial motivations behind smart city projects by applying them to 52 projects. Students from the Presidio Graduate School of San Francisco (California, USA) joined us in this phase.
Key results
What did we learn from our research? We gained a better understanding of who takes the initiative to set up greenfield smart cities or to refurbish existing cities into smarter ones. We learned that smart cities are not possible without government involvement or government backing, and that, in general, telecom service providers are not yet taking a leading role in smart cities, despite having assets that could enable a more active and beneficial role. (However, a lot is changing in this respect since we undertook the studies.) And finally, we found that Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) play a major role in the development of smart cities projects, but ICT is seldom seen as a separate segment with its own designated budget. ICT is typically part of other functional areas, such as transportation, energy saving, or waste management.
A market for service providers?
Our research results are available on the Alcatel-Lucent website (see Getting Smart about Smart Cities). But how do these results help us in better understanding the market opportunities for service providers? We have segmented smart city projects in terms of types and motivations, so that telecom service providers can develop a focused strategy for each.
We concluded that there are four basic types of smart cities (which can be further segmented). IT box types are the best fit with service provider offerings. Dream box projects require cooperation or partnerships with companies in the industry that drives the project. Black box types are “inaccessible,” except when invited to join the ecosystem. And, Fragmented box projects need a case-by-case evaluation to better define the appropriate strategy.
Our research also revealed three defining initial motivations, which will play a role in further development: social motivations intend to improve the quality of life for citizens and businesses; economic motivations result in observable advocacy for economic growth and a new economic model; eco-sustainability motivations intend to hit targeted sustainability goals that will result in environmental benefits. Service providers must take these motivations into account when creating solution offerings and approaching key decision makers.
Going forward
MCI’s research on smart cities does not stop here. The next round of research will focus on bringing out the voices of the citizens who live — or will live — in smart cities. Debbie Fisher is leading a survey of citizens, government officials and NGOs in cities worldwide. Some of the primary research results were presented at the Digital London event (March 13 and 14). Initial results of the research in Chattanooga (USA) can be found in the blog “Smart Cities – Today’s Difference; Tomorrow’s Ideas.”
The Western Australia city of Geraldton will receive help from IBM to create a roadmap to improve technology thanks to a grant as part of IBM’s Smart Cities Challenge.
Up to six IBM senior executives from around the world will reside in the city for three weeks and speak to businesses and citizens to ascertain the issues the city is facing. It will then recommend initiatives for improvement.
Miranda Scarff, manager of corporate citizenship and affairs at IBM Australia, told Computerworld that Geraldton’s grant submission was a standout, with the city highlighting its desire to make the most of technology infrastructure investments in the region and the National Broadband Network. The city also wants to improve data sharing between agencies.
“We’re seeing a convergence of factors which set the stage for rapid advances in the efficiency and scope of citizen services,” said Ian Carpenter, City of Greater Geraldton mayor, in a statement.
“IBM’s Smarter Cities grant comes at a pivotal time in Geraldton’s development as we seek to improve the living quality of all our citizens.”
Scarff said the aim of the grant wasn’t to provide software, but instead to create a clear roadmap for improvement.
“So they provide the city with an official report and recommendations about how to improve the liveability of the city in terms of whatever it is that the council put forward as projects to focus on,” she said.
"So it’s really up to Geraldton to further identify what projects they’d like the IBM experts to come and address and then we would put forward recommendations for the council."
The $50 million IBM Smarter Cities Challenge is a three-year program and part of the company’s philanthropic initiatives. It will provide technology and services to 100 municipalities worldwide over the course of the program. A total of 33 cities across the world will receive the grant in 2012, with Townsville, Queensland, the first Australian city to receive the grant.
Three IBM experts from the United States and three from Australia spent three weeks in Townsville working with the city to help it leverage data technology to help it become a sustainable city. The council is currently implementing initiatives such as collaborative portals for the community and strategies for smarter building management.
“We’re finding with most of the grants that have been done to date that the idea is certainly to share the lessons learnt with other cities around the world,” Scarff said.
By the end of 2012, 65 cities will have received the IBM grant. Applications for the 2013 program will open later this year.
If you go back a mere 6 months, the ecosystem of Smart City movers and shakers in discussions, conferences and exciting new service concepts was similar to that of today but with one exception; the Communications Service Providers (CSPs), specifically the Telecoms Operators were not there in the front line of the movement.
Our world is increasingly an urban one--the United Nations projects that nearly 5 billion people will live in cities by the year 2030, due to both the expansion of mega-cities and the creation of new urban centers. Cisco wants to be the company that makes all those metropolises not just function, but flourish.
The company is peddling its knowledge and its services to city planners around the world, and last week it announced that it had picked up three important new customers. Developers in India, Ecuador, and Canada have asked Cisco to come up with master plans for fully wired communities. Presumably if the customers like the results they'll ask Cisco to put its plans into action.
It's important progress in a growing business sector: Cisco has estimated that smart cities offer a $13 billion market opportunity just in the next five years. "Last year we were explaining to communities and developers why smart communities were necessary, and why it’s important to build a 21st century city," Hardik Bhatt, director of Cisco's Smart+Connected Communities initiative, told me in an interview. "Now the discussion is moving into how to do it."
Cisco has a showcase in Songdo, a city we reported on last year that's rising in South Korea on land reclaimed from the Yellow Sea. The project is notable for both its bright green credentials--public transit, green space, and water conservation systems abound--and also for its sophisticated IT nervous system, courtesy of Cisco. Apartments throughout the city are being equipped with Cisco's TelePresence units for video conferencing, and the company is constructing a central control room that it says will allow government departments and utilities to leverage real-time information to improve city services, including public safety, traffic management, and energy conservation.
Even though Songdo isn't fully built-out yet, and it's still not clear if or when the most ambitious elements of the project will come to pass, Cisco is hoping to replicate that model around the world. "Songdo was the first customer deployment," says Marc Musgrove, a Cisco spokesman. "That model is migrating to places like Barcelona. We have a number of very interesting pilot projects there, like parking space management and how to route the buses more effectively. Barcelona is using the IT platform that we’re developing to give managers access to a pool of data."
Cisco's newly announced customers include the Delhi Mumbai Industrial Corridor Development Company, which is in charge of creating a vibrant urban landscape along the roughly 1400-kilometer train route that links Delhi and Mumbai. The developer expects to revamp some existing municipalities and build some new ones to reach a total of 24 cities; Cisco is now working on the IT master plan for the first two pilot cities, Dholera in the state of Gujarat and Shendra in Maharashtra.
Another new customer is the government of Guayaquil, the most populous city in Ecuador, which wants an IT plan that will allow it to upgrade health care, education, public safety, and e-government services. Finally, a developer in Toronto, Canada has asked Cisco for help with a new residential and commercial development in the north sector of the city.
Why have you been so successful in reaching some of your goals, but not others? If you aren't sure, you are far from alone in your confusion. It turns out that even brilliant, highly accomplished people are pretty lousy when it comes to understanding why they succeed or fail. The intuitive answer — that you are born predisposed to certain talents and lacking in others — is really just one small piece of the puzzle. In fact, decades of research on achievement suggests that successful people reach their goals not simply because of who they are, but more often because of what they do.
Too often the answer is “not much”. When smart cities support wealth creation, they become a powerful economic force. Wealth is the engine that powers community prosperity.
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