Engaging
It promotes citizen involvement and builds a new sense of
ownership with scope for collaboration in every aspect of city life.

Transparent
It lifts the bonnet on how the city works – processes are visible,
dialogue is open, feedback is swift.

Nimble
It delivers services in real time with an enhanced ability to adjust
to citizens’ fast-changing needs.

Secure
It respects privacy, protects data and leverages technology to
enhance the physical security of citizens.

Download the Social media and the city new paper

Watch Social Media Enabled Cities webinar

Technorati Tags: IBM, Smarter Cities, Smarter Planet, social business

Technorati Tags: Bitcarrier, ibm smartcamp, Martin Mendez

Jonathan Steel, Energy Aid

Guest post by
Jonathan Steel,
CEO of UK-based charity Energy Aid

Jonathan is also founder and Chairman of technology consultancy The Bathwick Group, and Chairman of Change London, a social enterprise focused on sustainability and youth unemployment.

As we enter the United Nations Year of Sustainable Energy for All, Pauline Latham OBE MP hosted the Parliamentary launch of the newest Global Energy NGO, Energy Aid, at the Houses of Parliament in London.  We were supported directly at the launch by DFID, IBM, Practical Action, Seeds for Development and The Ashden Awards.

The evening was one of the first major landmarks for Energy Aid as we continue to expand our presence in the international development field and the energy industry and strive to raise awareness of the need to ensure universal energy access. During the launch we stood among 150 of the UK’s leading business people, academics and political figures and called on them to help support us in our mission to eradicate global energy poverty.

Currently one in five of the world’s population lacks access to electricity, and nearly 3 billion people still cook over open fires. The lives of people in the world’s poorest areas including South America, South Asia and sub Saharan Africa could change forever if they had access to modern energy for heating, lighting, cooking, communications and mechanical work. Access to energy is vital if we are to break the cycle of poverty for hundreds of millions of people around the world.

The plight of energy-poor people was brought to life by Timothy, a farmer from Uganda who spoke about how access to energy has transformed his family’s lives. He also spoke of the opportunities that exist to help communities throughout Uganda and across Africa.

The feedback from this event and from Energy Aid’s presence at the launch of the UN Year in Abu Dhabi has brought the need for our unique collaborative approach to private sector engagement in the third sector into sharp focus. We now have a strong band of supporters from across the governmental, charity and commercial spectrum.

Now that our launch period is over, we are reaching out to corporates, other charities and political leaders and asking for their support. Providing universal energy access is one of the most important challenges of our time – but no one organisation can meet the challenge alone, and collaborative approaches are now needed.

With IBM and international development charity Practical Action as founding partners, Energy Aid plans to provide investment and resources including data, technology and skills to support charities and agencies running or planning energy projects for the disenfranchised, and we are developing a platform for private sector consortia to identify and fund new markets for energy services in many countries around the world.

Our research shows that only a fifth of projects in this space achieve their goals, and there is a lack of long-term planning and investment. We aim to address these shortfalls, combining commercial rigour, corporate expertise and finance with best-of-class NGO experience to create a charity for the 21st century that, working with existing actors, will achieve the change which is so desperately needed.

Follow @energy_aid

Technorati Tags: charity, energy, energyaid, international development, Smarter Energy, uk

Much of the growth in new markets comes from the entrepreneurial companies who are building the new applications.

IBM is an integrator. In the Smarter Planet sphere, the integrator can take new technologies and services to market more quickly than the startups can. So IBM has a strategy of forming partnerships with innovative startups, and, in some cases, buying them.

Click here to view the embedded video.

To get the most value out of new sources of data, interconnectivity and analytics, cities have to integrate their data and their operations–breaking down the barriers between individual departments. Technology is one of the key tools for integrating this information and these operations.

So IBM has built a platform for integration called the Intelligent Operations Center. “Think of this an analytics hub were we can do high volume real time data analysis, including predictive analytics,” he says.

The idea is to pre-integrate a lot of the pieces of technology in the intelligent operations center. Now IBM is partnering with companies or buying them. One example is i2, a leader in public safety.

We want startups to see this as a development platform they can build upon. Together, we can build a total solution.

We’re also working on integration platforms for other industries, including the financial sector, health care sector, etc.

Here’s a quote he uses frequently when he talks to city leaders about making their cities smarter: “Gentlemen, we have run out of money. Now we must think!” Sir Winston Churchill.

Discovery techniques based on social media are already helping local authorities to shape the future and to define exactly what a smarter city should look like. Coventry in the UK’s West Midlands is a case in point.

CovJam is a collaborative online venture staged by Coventry City Council and IBM. It used social media as part of a unique three-day brainstorming exercise to identify ways to make Coventry a smarter city.

IBM’s “jam” technology is a proven technique for drawing on the wisdom of crowds, capturing ideas in a way that isn’t possible using traditional forms of consultation. CovJam generated more than 2,000 posts, with 82 per cent of re-registered participants, including residents, public-sector organisations and companies, taking part.

Following the event, IBM used corporate brand and reputation analysis to organise the unstructured information, identify patterns and to help the city council to prioritise key topics and viewpoints. For the council, CovJam provided new ideas; for local people and businesses, it provided an easily accessible opportunity for people to become active citizens.

As well as providing a channel for capturing and analysing realtime information, social media provides a critical feedback mechanism, with citizens able to report on everything from road closures to broken water mains. Commuters can also provide feedback after an incident or event is reported, using the social web including Twitter, blogs and forums.

Social media also has a unique capacity to capture the mood of the moment and to spur powerful, impromptu actions. That can have both a positive and negative impact: social media may have been used by some rioters to organise criminal activity during the disturbances that took place in English cities during the summer of 2011. Yet the same social media helped to galvanise the unprecedented community response that followed.  An account on Twitter – @riotcleanup – attracted more than 70,000 followers in a matter of hours, with residents turning out to help in the clean-up operation across the country.

Download the Social media and the city new paper

Technorati Tags: IBM, Smarter Cities, Smarter Planet, social business

Editor’s note: Startup entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and business leaders will gather in San Francisco for the IBM SmartCamp competition world finals next week (Jan. 31, Feb. 1 and 2.) To follow the event virtually, return to A Smarter Planet for liveblogging, view livestreaming video and follow the Twitter hashtags #IBM SmartCamp and #startups.

How do you create something from nothing? It seems like magic to take an idea and turn it into a growing enterprise.  Yet this is what entrepreneurs do every day.   And that’s also what we did when we created IBM SmartCamp.

Our journey started almost 3 years ago.  I was traveling to conferences and events around Europe. As I met entrepreneurs, it became clear that very few had heard about what we think is the biggest technology opportunity over the next decade: making the planet smarter by putting intelligence into things no one would recognize as computers, including cars, appliances, roadways, power grids, buildings, farms, waterways and clothing.

It became clear: We needed to do something to get the startup community focused on making a smarter planet- and help the ones who do so become successful.

Click here to view the embedded video.

IBM doesn’t invest directly in startups, but we’re heavily involved in the startup community. We acquire 15-20 companies a year.  We are investors in the funds of many of the leading VC firms. We believed we could help passionate entrepreneurs succeed by connecting them with individuals who had built or invested in great companies.

SmartCamp started life as an internal startup. It was a night and weekend activity for a small group of us. We had no resources and no budget. However it’s amazing how many people wanted to help these early stage companies grow.

We piloted the program in Dublin in Oct 2009.  We sought out like minded individuals and organisations who were excited by the idea of working with startups.  We hoped we’d find the funds and resources to make our vision a reality.  ’This is too important to let lack of funds stop you – this is a great idea you’ll find a way to fund it’ was how one of the exec team put it. Immediately we discovered how infectious the passion of entrepreneurs is–how exciting it is to be surrounded by individuals who believe they can change the world. We were amazed at how some of the best and most experienced investors and mentors were willing to give up their time to be part of this for nothing material in return.

After a lot of work and a great event, we figured that this could be exported to other cities and regions. We sought out the best partners and mentors we could find and ended up being overwhelmed by support in Austin, Boston, Barcelona, Bangalore, Istanbul, London, New York, Rio, Silicon Valley, Stockholm, Shanghai and Tel Aviv.   The program scaled much quicker than we thought thanks to our amazing mentor network and the hard work of lots of local team who took on this additional responsibility because they too were infected by the entrepreneurs passion.

Now we are approaching our 2nd world finals.   The teams from last year have done very well.  A number of them raised significant investment rounds including Carecloud ($20.1m), Panoramic Power ($4.5m), Sproxil ($1.8m) and Streetline ($15m).  We also signed a global partnership with Streetline, a company that provides sensor-based street parking systems, to roll out a Smarter Parking Starter Kit.

From parking in the US to validating medicines in Africa these companies show it is possible to bring combine sensors, interconnectivity and analytics to bear on complex problems.   The SmartCamp mentors have proven how they can help accelerate these teams by sharing their wealth of experience and contacts.

Sometime I have to pinch myself to believe it is real. I recall listening to Jim Breyer from Accel (Forbes Midas List #1 tech investor)  at SmartCamp Rio talk with these early stage entrepreneurs about the amazing opportunities open to them. And I remember being pleasantly surprised when I turned on a television in a hotel room there and saw a BBC World Service feature on Sproxil’s progress in Africa. These confirm for me how well the SmartCamp program can support early stage entrepreneurs.

Overall, the past couple of years have taught me you can’t predict the future.  At our global finals event last year, we never imagined that our keynote speaker (then-Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen) would be busy negotiating a financial bailout package with IMF.  He delivered a great presentation at our event that in the face of an international crisis.

My takeaway message from all of this is that many things are out of your control. This is especially true for start-ups—with their very limited resources. However, the best entrepreneurs have belief and passion. It helps them to have investors and mentors lending a hand. But what matters most is their ability to respond to the daily cycle of opportunity and crisis.

Technorati Tags: ibm smartcamp

As we enter the New Year, happily, some things stay the same. Namely, IBM’s focus on helping cities become smarter and safer. IBM just announced how it is working with the Rochester and Las Vegas police departments to better forecast crime “hot spots” and proactively allocate resources accordingly.

The advanced software the will enable the cities to better identify incident pattern, to understand linkages between apparently isolated pieces of information, and to mine, share and extract intelligence from critical data in order to improve police prevention, response and investigation.

Rochester and Las Vegas join cities like New York; Memphis; Edmonton, Ca.;and many others as places where safety and security for citizens and businesses are being improved through new technologies, while preserving government’s scarce budget resources. In many ways, these smaller cities often need to be more innovative with technology as they work under tighter resource constraints.

And, despite these constraints, crime rates in the US are dropping – and I’d like to think that technology has played a significant role in that. According to the FBI’s Preliminary Semiannual Uniform Crime Report (released Dec. 19) crime rates within the first six months of 2011 were down compared to the same period of 2010:

• Violent crimes reported fell by 6.4%
• Arson offenses down by 8.6%
• Motor vehicle theft fell 5%

For communities to continue to see an increase in public safety, we’re going to have to prioritize. Recently I wrote an article that appeared in Contingency Today that highlights what I believe with be the top three priorities for public safety agencies for 2012. In short, I said that integration, analytics and the use of technology to act as “force multipliers” and to battle shrinking budgets will be key factors. I’m glad to see that Rochester and Las Vegas are proving me right.

Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter all report membership in the hundreds of millions. Google+, the social media network launched by the search engine giant early in 2011, saw 25 million people sign up in its first four weeks. Foursquare popularised geolocation in social media, and now photographs, tweets and status updates can be tagged with your location. Our appetite for social media is changing the way we communicate and offers new ways to interact with our cities.

Over a billion people worldwide log on to social networking sites. British internet users on PCs clocked up a total of 169 million hours on Facebook alone in April 2011, according to research by Ofcom, the UK’s communications regulator. Mobile users of Facebook, meanwhile, spend more than five and a half hours on the site each month. Clearly, social media is not a fad. Instant communication over social networks – and the presumption of instant feedback – now underpins just about every aspect of our lives. This includes our relationships with local and city governments. The spectacular growth of social media has also increased expectations about transparency and the right to participate in the policy-making process. Used properly, social media represents new value for local authorities, especially when coupled with the right technology, such as a secure private cloud. Leading cities in the UK, US and beyond are already tapping into this hunger for public engagement, with social media playing a part in everything from town planning to combating traffic jams.

Download the Social media and the city new paper

The rise of social media is undeniable, with over 800 million Facebook users worldwide and 140 million tweets sent every day, social media can no longer be dismissed as a trend or generational phenomenon. It is therefore vital for cities and the communities they represent to not only monitor these social channels, but to also actively participate in them. Social media represents a unique opportunity for local councils to offer innovative new services and communicate with their citizens. This webinar will bring together experts from local governments, digital agencies, and technology providers to address the key challenges facing councils in implementing such a programme.

Please click here to register to this free webinar

http://marketforce.eu.com/Conferences/SocialMediaEnabledCities12/

Technorati Tags: IBM, predictive analytics, Smarter Cities, smarter city, Smarter Planet

The Galley has been gathering applications from software hackers, artists, community activists, engineers and urban planners who want to participate by producing installations, performances, workshops, apps, etc.  The call for proposals closes January 20, but Dillon says it’s not too late to get started on a proposal and urges people with innovative ideas to bring them forward. Find out more here.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The plan is to use the entire city of Dublin as a living laboratory for events and experiments. But the scope of the thinking is global. The exhibit will tie in with the Dublin City of Science conference which will bring hundreds of scientists from around the world next July to showcase the latest advances in science, encourage cross-discipline and cross-border collaboration and promote the role of science in society. The HACK THE CITY organizers also hope to take elements of the exhibition on the road in the future to cities around the world, including San Jose, California.

IBM is one of the sponsors of HACK THE CITY and will take the lead in one of the projects–an effort to use technology to develop practical solutions to urban problems. “The idea is to come up with solutions that we can then publish out to the world,” says Martin Kelly, a partner in IBM’s Venture Capital Group.

Science Gallery is an enlightened organization. It’s about promoting science, but it does that by mixing science, technology and art. Approaches like this help create well-rounded individuals and transcendent societies.

Technorati Tags: IBM, Science Gallery, Trinity College Dublin