It’s wonderful to see IBM allowing its workers to participate in the social web. This is a fantastic blog– and it’s exciting to see so much happening in rethinking infrastructure for the next century.

I would like to see more foresight oriented pieces here– wondering about some competitive notions of ‘smart’ systems– and how IBM sees the evolution of sensors and instrumented environments– whether IBM or Cisco could in essence ‘own’ data from full ecosystems? Or do you expect data to be shared– w/ back end analytics to be profit side of things?

I’d love to see some posts on market structure of an instrumented world. Yes, world needs to be ‘more collaborative and transparent’– but will companies own those sensors to gain ROI? Or is this a service model built on open hardware?

Thanks!
Garry Golden

Editor
The Energy Roadmap

Ajay, you are exactly correct. There are a lot of different components into creating smarter systems. And they have common elements. Underlying it all is the ability to capture data to enable businesses, governments and, importantly, consumers to make better decisions. And on that latter point – consumer behavior – education becomes an important imperative. Education to build understanding for the need to change behavior, and education on what to do about it. But without better information (from utilities, etc.) there’s only so much consumers can do…

Ajay Phatak

If we remain as sensitive to natural resources as sensitive we are to say money… we would certainly be better of.

Ajay Phatak
CoreObjects

Mark Bedeman Global Freight Logistics SME

Technology is the food for the party. We need the people, the music and the atmosphere to have a party. In other words, bring in the individual and society. Without simultaneous, integrated movement in all of these, and honouring the needs of each, we will move too slowly.

For example, take installed renewable energy capacity. The difference between the global leaders and the laggards is in the way the global leaders have aligned individual interests, social interests, government policy and business interests towards a compelling objective. And by doing so the results have made business sense, social sense and individual sense.

We need now the same level of alignment globally for all the challenges facing us. Getting this global alignment fast is challenging, but achievable. We only need a small group of catalysts in the key human disciplines connected virtually for this to happen. (For example, the Renaissance was a time of crisis and change. Wikipedia lists only 182 key figures who catalysed the Renaissance.) There are already a number of non-profit organisations doing this using current web technology. For example, Robin and myself in Renaissance2 (http://www.renaissance2.eu and http://r2meshwork.ning.com), the Club of Budapest (http://www.clubofbudapest.org/), the TED talks, plus many more.

These web tools are still very young. (Facebook only went global two years ago.) What is IBM doing to create the next generation of tools for powerful collaboration? Imagine what we could achieve together in the next two years if we took really seriously creating cutting-edge web tools to empower meshworks of doers! Doers in business, government, science, arts, civil society, and in our homes.