Brussels unveils ‘smart cities’ innovation scheme

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.

Source: EuroActive

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Posted in: ICT,smart city

Microsoft’s Downfall: Inside the Executive E-mails and Cannibalistic Culture That Felled a Tech Giant

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.”

Source: VanityFair, By: Kurt Eichenwald

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Posted in: ICT

Twitter’s Pitch Deck for Big Advertisers

Twitter’s ad business is looking less like an experiment and more like a real business, one that could generate $1 billion a year in the not-too-distant future.

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!
• Also important for Twitter to keep repeating: Unlike Facebook, we’re totally cool with mobile.
• Those “Event pages” Twitter rolled out last month are going to be important for big advertisers. Obviously they are — that’s why Twitter spent money buying TV ads to promote them. But that slide highlighting them reinforces just how attractive they will be for brands – and what a nice compliment they’ll be to 140-character bleats — when Twitter gets around to selling them.
• 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.

Source: AllThingsD, By: Peter Kafka

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Posted in: ICT