We’re pleased to announce the line-up for IBM SmartCamp 2012. This is our program for helping entrepreneurs who are developing products and services that make the world work better. Entrepreneurs who participate gain access to mentors who understand their industry and can help them develop their businesses. Also, networking and publicity can lead to venture funding.

We plan more than 17 SmartCamp events worldwide this year. The schedule starts in Miami on May 15th, with a new format focused on healthcare. Over the last two years we have seen growing interest in certain topics and believe the timing is right to have dedicated events. These one- and two-day events will bring together entrepreneurs, mentors and investors in particular industries allowing a more focused discussion.  We will follow Miami up with New York on May 24th with a focus on Smart Cities. The New York event was planned to coincide with TechCrunch Disrupt NYC,  to allow mentors and companies to make the most of the community.

For more information and to apply, you can get started here.

The IBM SmartCamp initiative has been a big success since its launch in 2010. Companies have received significant press in Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and Bloomberg, and raised over $50M in venture capital. Some startups have have begun to work closely with IBM and expand their businesses.  In addition, the program is now live in 15 countries. We are very grateful to the network of over 400 experienced mentors who give their time to work with these companies.

This year, we are introducing a new category of start-up that will continue to the global finals event.  To ensure we continue to recognize the best early stage companies around the world we will now have a ‘best newcomer’ category at each event.  We think combining this new category with our more traditional selection criteria will allow us to identify a strong, diverse group of companies for the 2012 IBM SmartCamp Global Finals.

We are keen to hear your opinions and have included a short survey to get your views on what we need to change and improve.  The survey will take no more than 3 minutes to complete and we’ll be happy to share the results with you. Please click here.

Otherwise, we hope we’ll see you soon at one of the events in the near future.

Schedule – KickStart Events

·    Miami (15th May – healthcare focus)
·    New York (24th May – smart cities focus)
·    Munich (20th June)
·    Bangalore (18th July)
·    Tel Aviv (12th Sept)
·    Moscow (mid Sept)
·    Paris (28th Sept)
·    Istanbul (3rd Oct)
·    London (5th Oct)
·    Cape Town (10th Oct)
·    Mexico City (11th Oct)
·    Moscow (mid Oct)
·    Dublin (25th Oct)

Schedule – Regional Finals
These events will feed into the regional finals in the following locations
·    Asia – Beijing (23rd/24th Sept)
·    Europe\Middle East \Africa – Berlin (13th/14thNov)
·    North America – Boston (20th/21st June)
·    South America – Sao Paolo (28th/29th Nov)

It is hard to believe that in just over two years SmartCamp has expanded from a pilot in Dublin to a global program.  We are totally dependent on the support of our partners and while IBM is a huge company, we realize that for the planet to become smarter we need a global ecosystem of entrepreneurs and investors – all focused on the same prize of making the world work better.

Technorati Tags: ibm smartcamp, Martin Kelly

By Sriram Rajan, Territory Executive – South, IBM General Business, India/South Asia 

It’s said that technology is “making the world smaller,” and while that may be true, the world’s cities are growing at an astonishing rate.

By the year 2050, nearly 75% of the world’s population will reside in urban areas, and trends show that staggering population growth will impact cities on a global scale. The most significant of this urban overcrowding is happening in countries where the economies are booming. In response, governments of today’s emerging economies will need to find new and efficient ways of accommodating urban growth and better managing citizens’ needs. They will look for smarter cities.

Hyper-Growth Economies Embracing Innovative Thinking for Growth

To address this rapid population growth, and get out ahead of the potential issues that come from overcrowding, small to mid-size cities in the world’s emerging economies have been adopting new technology solutions to manage everything from planning energy grids, to building more efficient buildings and integrating emergency response agencies. By building the infrastructure to give local businesses the technology they need, these smaller cities have been able to fast track innovative ideas while harnessing the entrepreneurial spirit inherent in a smaller city.

We’ve been working with many smaller cities emerging as innovation hubs in growth economies around the world, to help get the most advanced and efficient infrastructure in place. For example, Kochi, one of the smaller but fast growing cities in India has experienced rapid economic growth in recent years due to the development of tourism, manufacturing, shipbuilding, seafood and spices exports, and IT industries. IBM has been working with clients in the region to provide advanced technologies and services to aid their business growth and bring new efficiencies.

We’ve also been engaged with Manappuram Finance, one of India’s largest listed and highest credit rated gold loan company, to help drive transformation throughout its entire IT infrastructure. This will help Manappuram Finance differentiate its service to customers and gain market share in a highly commoditized market,

We are also finding there is significant opportunity for growth in India, an emerging market in terms of maximum opportunity for rapid growth, next to China. We aim to nurture the entrepreneurial spirit in India by providing innovative and efficient technological resources for local startups and teaming up with local governments to install data analytics technologies and build new infrastructure. We recently announced the opening of a branch office in Ludhiana, Punjab in Northern India, as part of the company’s continued geographic expansion across India/South Asia.

India is also a great example of how managing population growth by directing new city-dwellers away from the massive urban centers and out to smaller cities can help continue the nation’s economic successes. By steering population overflow into smaller cities built with structures that feature efficient technologies, the country is able to avoid the challenge of updating and adapting the existing, and often aging, infrastructure of its major cities to accommodate growing populations. These smaller smarter cities run on systems that are effective, environmentally secure and allow city officials to monitor dozens of data feeds, in order to anticipate the community’s needs.

Building Smarter Cities and Growing Local Business Go Hand in Hand

The lifeblood of any community is a strong entrepreneurial spirit and encouraging growth in smaller cities will in turn grow local businesses. Because of their scale, governments of smaller cities have a natural ability to personally interact and align with local businesses, and vice versa. By employing advanced analytics to uncover trends and inefficiencies, businesses are able to better understand their customers and cities can better anticipate public trends. Additionally, managing and analyzing data helps supply targeted public-private solutions to local problems and allows smaller cities to be better prepared to meet the challenges of growth and urbanization, as well as foster the continued growth of an already strong entrepreneurial spirit.

Technorati Tags: cities, smaller cities, Smarter Cities

The huge earthquake in the Indian Ocean on Wednesday didn’t cause catastrophic damage, fortunately. But it caused me to reflect on the frequency of natural disasters and their impact on cities.  In the past couple of years, I’ve been called in to advise government leaders and businesses in Chile, Japan and New Zealand after major earthquakes devastated cities. These are shattering experiences. But there’s one positive element: Disasters force city leaders and citizens to re-imagine what their cities can be—and to make them more resilient.

There are two key factors in urban resilience. First, communities have to be capable of recovering quickly from disasters. Then they must build up long-term resilience, which depends heavily on having sustainable ways of getting things done.

Ruined building in Chile

If you go back over history, look at the wave of adoption that cities made of sewers, of fresh water supplies, of railways, of subways, electrification, telephones. These are all waves of technologies that cities adopted, and not all at once. They took significant amounts of time to propagate. And now this notion of applying information technology to improve the flows of information among citizens and between citizens and their governments has become the order of the day in this age of information.

So what are the kinds of benefits that cities are drawing from that around the world? Some of the early adopters are driven by specific events. For example, in Rio de Janeiro we’ve done a great deal of work in the last couple of years to help the city create an intelligent operations center for managing municipal operations. That project was driven by a terrible flood in 2010 combined with fact that the World Cup will be there in two years’ time and the Summer Olympics will be there in 2016.

Another place where we have been involved is a small city in the Midwest of the United States, Dubuque, that basically lost its identity. It lost its core industry, which was machining wood, and struggled for a long time to find a new identity and eventually seized on the identity of becoming well known as a center for sustainability. This has been a terrific collaboration. The community collectively developed and supports a broad range of sustainability goals and we’ve been able to work with them on pilots to explore different ways of achieving those goals.

Cities rebuilding after disasters or addressing economic stresses need to decide on the narrative they want to tell about themselves. It’s vital to have a strong vision that is strongly embraced by the broad community, so you can make progress quickly and in a far less contentious way. And it’s crucial to involve the citizenry in shaping that vision.

The concept of the sustainable city has become a global movement. These are early days, but I believe that while the momentum could be slowed, nothing can stop it now.

Technorati Tags: Colin Harrison, IBM

By Clay Luthy, Global Distributed Energy Resource Leader, Energy & Utilities Industry, IBM

With gas prices hovering at $4.15 per gallon where I live, the talk of electric vehicles (EVs) has increased with vigor. More of my neighbors and friends are toying with the idea of making the switch – much of their reluctance though stems from the fear of inconvenience – will I find a charging station as easily as a gas pump, how will this impact my energy bill, how far can I go on a single charge? These consumer concerns are driving new innovations – uniting forward thinking players to perfect and deploy a smarter EV driving experience.

Click here to view the embedded video.

As a resident of Washington DC, I don’t have to look very far without noticing the well-established bike sharing program that is currently in place.  Locals are biking to and from the subway station and to work while tourists are cruising along to increase the number of monuments and museums they can see in a day.

This approach to urban commuting is now applied to electric vehicles. For example, in Paris, Autolib launched an EV sharing program with great success. According to initial reports, 250 vehicles hit the road on the first day, 2000 are expected this summer and 3,000 are planned within the next two years. Like bike sharing, I can see why this mode has taken off in a city with over two million citizens and highly dense roads – a strategy that I believe, should be replicated in cities around the world.

New business models are being deployed to support privately owned electric vehicles as well. In Israel, Better Place is set to go live on a deployment of networked charging stations. Their innovative business model helps reduce the cost as users pay for electric vehicles much like they do a cell phone – they receive a discounted price on the vehicle and battery in exchange for subscribing to a service to recharge. Innovative business models are often what is needed to bring new technology to the mainstream.

Innovation is also driving the way we create fuel for electric vehicles. Already we are seeing renewable energy becoming cost competitive with traditional energy sources due to improved manufacturing processes and technological breakthrough. Within the next 5 years, we can expect to see the levelized cost (a common cost metric) of electricity generated from roof mounted solar to be the same as, or potentially even less than, your retail electricity price. This, to me, is exciting news for both our environment as well as for our transportation system.

It’s a known fact that electric vehicles can help increase the use of renewable energy. If EVs can communicate with the grid, they can charge based on the availability of renewable energy resources, such as sun and wind. This will help overcome the variability and relative unpredictability of renewable energy (the sun doesn’t always shine when it’s supposed to!) —a challenge that needs to be addressed if renewable energy will scale.

It’s also why the recently announced project with Honda and PG&E is so important – it allows vehicles and the grid to directly communicate with each other. Layer in IBM’s cloud based optimization and automatically, the vehicles become intelligent —now with the ability to charge in accordance with grid conditions.

IBM, Honda, and PG&E Enable Smarter Charging for Electric Vehicles

However, innovative business models and electricity from renewable sources will be less impactful if we are not successful at making the experience of recharging your electric vehicle as easy as pumping gas. This means that we must ensure open access to charge posts for all users regardless of who owns or operates them. Innovation is likewise occurring on this front — Data standards are under development to ensure charge posts communicate in a common way Think of it this way, what happens when you go from one city or state to another and need to recharge your vehicle?

You may be the realm of another service provider and much like cell phones in the old days, if proper systems aren’t place, you may not be able to recharge outside of your network.

In Europe, IBM and a consortium of partners are building a demonstration system that allows for seamless interoperability. As an example, a participant could drive from Barcelona to Rome, charge their vehicle and be accurately billed for the electricity even though the network of charge posts in the two cities are owned and operated by two separate entities.

Similarly, the IBM team in Slovakia is working with ZSE on a project that is designed to make charging across territories more convenient for consumer. Using e-mobility technology, this study will help interconnect the Slovakian capital city, Bratislava and Vienna with a “green highway” of public charging stations.

IBM and ZSE Create Virtual Green Highway for Electric Vehicles

It’s innovations like these that keep me both optimistic and fascinated by the future of the electric vehicle. With fuel prices rising higher and higher, the decision to switch to EVs is getting more attention but is till by no means an easy one, especially considering that Americans on average purchase a new car every five years. So, we all want to ensure we’re making the right decision.

The industry, local and national governments, auto-manufactures and utilities are making significant in-roads – the rest is up to us.

Today marks the last day of #EVweek. Thank you for participating in all of the various online activities. If have more opinions, we’d like to hear them. Continue the conversation today on IBM’s People for A Smarter Planet (P4SP) for #SmarterFriday, a daylong chat about EVs.

Technorati Tags: Clay Luthy, EDISON, EKZ, electric vehicles, energy, EV, EVweek, Honda, IBM, PG&E, smart grid, Smart Grids, Smarter Cities, Smarter Energy, Smarter Planet, Smarter Transportation, sustainability, traffic, transportation, ZSE

By Jonathan Marshall, Chief, External Communications
Pacific Gas and Electric Company

Electric vehicle (EV) owners and electric utilities may soon enjoy a much closer and more fulfilling relationship than traditional car owners have with gas stations, thanks to a new pilot project announced today by IBM, Honda Motors, and Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E). This collaboration aims to demonstrate the ability to optimize the charge schedule for each customer’s EV battery so that the needs of customers and the electric grid are satisfied on an ongoing basis. That’s still a stretch for most utilities.

When the typical power engineer hears “electric vehicle,” he or she usually thinks: “challenge.” A plug-in vehicle can draw as much power as three homes in the more temperate parts of California. An enthusiastic bunch of early adopters could potentially overload local circuits if they all charge up at the same time in the same neighborhood.

But PG&E is thinking instead, “opportunity.” For one thing, we have a growing number of clean electric vehicles in our own fleet, from Chevy Volts to a new class of extended-range pickup trucks from Via Motors. And we know that widespread adoption of EVs throughout California will help the state meet its ambitious clean-air goals.

For another, we believe there’s great potential for using the latest “smart grid” technology to facilitate vehicle charging at night, when demand is low. By making use of underutilized generation and grid resources at off-peak times, EVs can help utilities make more efficient use of their assets and spread costs over a wider load without overtaxing the system.

PG&E demonstrated last year, in the first utility test of smart charging, that it could control vehicle charging through its SmartMeter™ infrastructure. But in a competitive marketplace, many customers may want to put control of their charging in other hands—such as the vehicle manufacturer or another trusted vendor. The whole process may someday be controlled by a third-party app on your smart phone.

The IBM-Honda-PG&E pilot takes an important step in that direction. The basic concept is to marry Honda’s knowledge of the status of its EVs and PG&E’s knowledge of the status of its grid with IBM’s “cloud” computing power to make charging smarter, simpler, and more efficient.

“We want to encourage third parties to innovate,” said Ulric Kwan, PG&E’s project manager. “What we haven’t yet demonstrated is whether you can develop a ‘brain’ in the cloud that meets our needs and those of our customers. Each customer has a different set of needs. The cloud has to figure this out and provide the proper charging levels to each EV, adapting to changing customer requirements and grid needs.”

This new pilot will demonstrate exactly that. IBM will take data from several Honda Fit EVs, via cellular uplink, and analyze it together with sample data from PG&E on the status of its electric distribution network to help optimize the charging schedule for each car. (Honda plans to begin selling the Fit EV to California customers this summer).

PG&E, meanwhile, still has plans—awaiting approval by the California Public Utilities Commission—to recruit up to 100 EV owners to test more advanced communications between the utility and EV battery chargers via SmartMeters™. This proposed pilot would bring us one step closer to the holy grail of using EV batteries as a form of distributed energy storage for capturing and making good use of fluctuating supplies of renewable energy.

For all of these projects, the overriding goal is the same: to ensure safe, reliable, and affordable service to our customers. Fortunately, PG&E has some very smart partners to help us make that happen.

Join PG&E and IBM for the #EVWeek Twitter Chat on April 12, from noon to 1pm ET @smarterplanet. For more information, visit: http://storify.com/smarterplanet/p4spchat-electric-vehicle-adoption

Technorati Tags: electric vehicles, energy, EVs, EVweek, IBM, PG&E, Smart Grids, Smarter Energy, Smarter Planet, Smarter Transportation, traffic, transportation

What’s the challenge with buildings today?
Buildings – from houses and flats, offices, manufacturing sites to sports facilities and retail outlets – are massive energy users. Experts estimate that commercial and residential buildings consume one third of the world’s energy. If worldwide energy-use trends continue, buildings will become the largest consumer of global energy by 2025, more than the transportation and industrial sectors combined. Massive urbanisation is driving this momentum.

Furthermore, by 2050 the world’s population is projected to be more than 9 billion, with roughly 70% of people living in urban areas, creating a significant challenge for the sustainability, energy efficiency and physical capacity levels of cities worldwide.

A city’s infrastructure is comprised of a number of systems, including roads, bridges, public transportation, sewage, water and energy utilities, as well as public and private buildings. What many people don’t realise is how much buildings contribute to this strain.

How do buildings get smarter?
Technology today can make it possible to ‘listen’ to the abundance of information emitted from buildings. By analysing this data and creating new applications to access it, we can identify and squeeze out building inefficiencies to reduce cost, improve energy usage, extend the operating life of the associated equipment and make buildings better places in which to live and work.

Smarter buildings can be highly-instrumented and connected ‘systems of systems’, providing critical information on not only what the building consumes in terms of water and power and the waste that it produces, but also the way in which it is used in practice, for example how its population changes during the course of the day, which specific areas people are occupying, etc.

Can you provide some examples of the kind of work you are doing?
Smarter Buildings is an area where we probably have some of the best examples of ‘taking our own medicine’. IBM has achieved some very significant results. For example, we’ve deployed real-time asset monitoring technology at one of our major manufacturing sites in Rochester, Minnesota, where we had already achieved savings of 5% to 7% per annum through traditional energy-reduction activities. Many might consider that to be a great result, but we’ve gone further. By analysing the performance of equipment against a set of advanced business rules, we’ve managed to make incremental energy savings of some 15%. At the same time, reactive maintenance has decreased by 16%, the hours per work order have reduced by 34% and the total number of work order hours has decreased by 49%, for those assets being monitored by our system.

We’re rolling out the same solution to our largest UK sites during 2012, as well as being in detailed discussions with a number of household names around deploying the same technology across their property portfolios.

What role will buildings play in creating smarter cities?
We will see groups of buildings start to mimic living systems – buildings will be addressed collectively as they relate to the ecosystem or the immediate community in which they are located. Smarter communities will help address health-related or environmental sustainability issues in a city, such as carbon emissions and local energy demand.

For example, rather than just looking at air quality in a building, we can think of the respiratory system of the locality in which the building ‘breathes’ – i.e. including the associated carbon emissions and other pollutants rather than just the ‘fresh’ air intake. This will drive measures like green roofs and corridors built to connect both horizontal and vertical surfaces, as well as blurring the lines between cities and the surrounding suburbs and countryside.

A community is a microcosm of a city – if you want to make a city smarter, starting at the local community level can be the first step to building a more manageable ecosystem. Successful community-level improvements can eventually be replicated and connected at a city level.

Much like the consumer has at the residential level, are you seeing better control over energy usage at the commercial buildings level?
Yes, today we have better control over energy usage, but soon buildings will be able to ‘choose’ their sources of energy. Think of it as an ‘energy cafe’ – making energy choices will be as easy as ordering a cappuccino.

Today, most coffee bars offer us free Wi-Fi. Tomorrow’s ‘energy cafe’ will provide access to a low-carbon, community-wide distributed energy system. Rather than using one form of renewable energy, it will incorporate a number of forms. Just like customers who order which type of food and beverage they want based on cost and source (such as ‘organic’ or ‘conventional’), we’ll be able to do the same with energy sources.

Organisations will increasingly be able to dynamically choose the source of their energy at their desired price, based on incentives, time of use, etc. If they have environmental targets to meet, they might decide to source 30% of their energy from more sustainable sources like solar and wind.

http://www.worldarchitecturenews.com/index.php?fuseaction=wanappln.commentview&comment_id=280

By Pat Davis, Vehicle Technologies Program Manager, Department of Energy (DOE)

“May you live in interesting times” can be either a blessing or a curse. Needless to say, those of us who work in the transportation sector are certainly living in interesting times, full of challenges and opportunities. Electrifying our vehicle fleet offers an abundance of both, making it a particularly exciting area for us at the Department of Energy (DOE).

As the manager for the U.S. Energy Department’s Vehicles Program, I lead a team working to get the most out of our cars and trucks, while minimizing their appetite for oil. Right now, 60 percent of the petroleum used in America fuels on-road vehicles—both consumer and commercial. A little less than half of this petroleum is imported, costing our country more than $1 billion every day. In addition to the national security implications of our dependence on foreign oil, our transportation sector also creates about one-third of America’s greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change.

Although these figures may paint a daunting picture of the challenge ahead, I’m optimistic about meeting our transportation needs in more sustainable ways. Plug-in vehicles that run on domestically-produced electricity offer environmental, social, and economic benefits, and the variety and the quantity of electric and hybrid cars and trucks on the road is increasing. Car makers are rolling out new models; while the Chevy Volt and Nissan Leaf are the most widely available models now, manufacturers are planning on introducing more than two dozen new plug-in vehicle models over the next two years. Tax incentives help more people have access to this cutting-edge technology and many cities are updating plans and policies for the charging infrastructure to be ready for these new vehicles.

We’re seeing incredible technologies emerge from the research we fund at our national laboratories and other research institutions. In particular, the cost of batteries is dropping dramatically. Our research has already helped lower the cost of advanced lithium ion batteries by 50 percent in the last few years. We’re on track to lower it another 50 percent, bringing it down to $300/kWhr by 2015. By the end of the decade, we hope to have it even lower – $125/kWhr.  Lowering battery cost will help lead to less expensive plug-in vehicles and potentially increase their all-electric range. Many of these breakthroughs have come about through improvements in battery components.  For example, Envia recently announced that they are close to building battery cells that cost less than half as much as existing ones. Cathode technology developed at DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory with support from DOE contributed to this leap forward.

Lightweight materials also offer great promise, because lighter vehicles require less energy to operate.  For every 10 percent in vehicle weight reduction, you could save fuel 6-8 percent on fuel. For electric cars, it means smaller batteries and lower costs. DOE is focused on reducing costs and widening the use of aluminum, magnesium, high strength steel, and carbon fiber composites.

Last year I participated in a roundtable dinner in Washington D.C, hosted by IBM and attended by General Motors, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Electric Drive Transport Association, MIT, and PEPCO Holdings. It was a general consensus that the combination of these upcoming advances and the urgent necessity to transform our fleet and the energy infrastructure brings us to a unique point in history. At the Department of Energy, we believe that electric drive offers great promise, we’re also continuing to research complementary technologies and smarter systems, such as advanced combustion and alternative home-grown fuels from non-food sources such as wood and waste streams. In addition, we look to industry and local governments to do their part. We encourage manufacturers to take the long view of these technologies by continuing on their push to produce more efficient vehicle models that meet consumers’ needs. We advise local governments to think holistically about their citizens’ transportation choices, including plug-in vehicles and by helping to put in place policies that support the introduction of those technologies. Most of all, we support efforts to learn from the best practices of others. Sharing a common vision will help all of us move forward to a more sustainable transportation future.

Today kicks off #EVweek. Join us for a weeklong discussion on Electric Vehicles. Follow #EVWeek to participate in a Twitter Chat on April 12, from noon to 1pm ET @smarterplanet. For more information, visit: http://storify.com/smarterplanet/p4spchat-electric-vehicle-adoption

Technorati Tags: DOE, electric vehicles, energy, EVs, smart grid, Smart Grids, Smarter Cities, Smarter Energy, Smarter Planet, Smarter Transportation, transportation

Today, IBM announced the 33 cities that will participate this year in its Smarter Cities Challenge grant program. This marks the second year in a three-year, $50 million, 100-city initiative. IBM sends five- or six-person teams of experts in a range of disciplines to help cities formulate strategies for improving the quality of life for their citizens.

By now, IBM has amassed a wealth of knowledge about how to help cities get started on transformational projects. Last year, the company engaged with 25 cities around the world, including St. Louis in the United States, Glasgow in the United Kingdom, Chiang Mai in Thailand and Johannesburg in South Africa. The previous year, they ran test programs in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam; Katowice, Poland; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Chengdu, China; and elsewhere. The themes of the projects ranged from education, transportation and to public safety to energy and sustainable economic development. Here’s a post on the Citizen IBM blog from Stephen Mandel, the mayor of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, about the engagement there.

After each engagement, IBM’s Corporate Citizenship team identifies lessons learned. The exercise is partly aimed at improving the program itself, but the team also gleans insights that could help any leader in any city launch an initiative aimed at fundamentally transforming an aspect of how the city works. Here are some of the most critical lessons for leaders:

Be Bold–Even Audacious. If you don’t set a high bar and really challenge yourselves, the progress you make will be marginal at best.

The United Kingdom, for instance, has set a target of halving carbon emissions from 1990 levels by 2025—with a progress report due in 2014. Glasgow, a Scottish industrial city, will require significant improvements in energy conservation to meet the overall goals. But, at the same time, the city has a high ratio of poor people who suffer from what city leaders call “fuel poverty.” Nearly 35% of Glasgow households can’t afford to heat their homes properly. The goal is to address both problems with the same initiative. For starters, the city is paying for a fuel subsidy program for poor people using the proceeds from clean energy projects.

Think Differently. Be willing to try new ways of doing things. Just being more efficient with conventional approaches, even those that worked well in the past, won’t work best now.

Antofagasta, Chile, is a thriving port city in the country’s arid mining region, but it lacks some of the quality-of-life amenities befitting a city of its size and importance. The city leaders decided to take an unusual tactic: Make the city greener, literally, by irrigating parks and open spaces. Yet the dry climate made that goal particularly challenging. The IBM team crafted a set of proposals designed to get the most out of the limited supply of water.

Pick a Target That’s a Shared Priority. To get something difficult done, it will have to be at or near the top of the priority lists of all of the participants. Everybody involved has to pull together or the group will be pulled apart.

The political leaders in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, and Charlotte, the county seat, invited municipal leaders from throughout the county to come together and agree on a project they could take on together. The theme they settled on, integrated regional capital planning, may not seem sexy, but, in a state where local government power is dispersed, it’s a necessary step for getting big things done.

Partner with Businesses and Non-profits. It’s important for city governments to engage with other actors in society, including universities and other non-profits, business organizations and individual businesses. Also, the earlier you get all the stakeholders involved, the better.

In Philadelphia, the Digital On-Ramps Initiative is aimed at preparing residents to work and thrive in the 21^st century economy. The initiative is being planned and managed by a consortium of institutions, including city departments, Drexel University, and a handful of civic groups, including the Greater Philadelphia Urban Affairs Coalition, which is made up of representatives from government, business and neighborhood groups.

Encourage Citizen Involvement. Citizens can provide valuable insights into the most effective ways to improve the quality of life in their city. In this social networking era, it’s even more crucial to engage with citizens, and, thanks to all of the new technology tools that are available, it’s easier to do so.

Helsinki, Finland, faces social shifts resulting from an aging native population combined with immigration from Eastern European countries. It aims to open its data to the public, but needs to identify the most effective ways for communicating with a changing citizenry. The IBM team met with a group of citizens gathered at a local university and solicited ideas for open-data applications that would appeal to the people of Helsinki.

Understand the Value of Data. Evidence-based decision making really works. You can do things smarter and better, also more efficiently and more quickly.

In Syracuse, New York, a former industrial center with a sizable housing vacancy problem, city leaders realized that gathering and analyzing data is crucial to identifying which troubled neighborhoods have the highest potential for turnarounds. That way they could focus resources on them. A close look at the data showed—perhaps counter-intuitively—that neighborhoods with a high rate of calls to the police about drug use and loud disturbances have a high potential for being saved. It means the residents care enough to complain.

Invest for the Future. Sure, money is tight, but cities must be prepared to invest up front for long term benefits.

Chengdu, China, has laid out a five-year plan for investing in cloud computing resources to support its many Intelligent Chengdu initiatives. Chicago, Illinois, plans to invest in creating five new science and technology-focused schools, which combine high school and community college, in partnerships with IBM and four other corporations. The city’s leaders understand that they have to invest in programs that will take years to deliver results. They think it’s vital to creating the skilled workforce that’s necessary to sustain a dynamic economy.

Take Action Immediately: The research and final report aren’t of much value if cities don’t take action based on them. These can be small steps: reallocation of funds, new data gathered, a working group set up or a staff position created. The most important thing is to keep the process moving.

A number of the cities were quick to implement some of IBM’s recommendations. For instance, Mecklenberg County, North Carolina, has signed agreements with all its municipalities to develop a consolidated capital budget planning process. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is developing a program for helping residents to continue or resume their educations. And Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, analyzes traffic data more rigorously to improve road safety.

For the complete report, click here.

Technorati Tags: IBM Smarter Cities Challenge

WASHINGTON D.C. On Capitol Hill this week, IBM Energy & Utilities Vice President Michael Valocchi (left) and Congressman Michael McCaul (Texas-10) examine IBM’s "Deep Thunder" weather forecasting and modeling technology, which can help better predict and minimize the impact of severe weather in the United States.

By Christopher Padilla

Vice President, Governmental Programs, IBM

This week, IBM leaders gathered with lawmakers to examine breakthrough technologies that are transforming the future of government.

The event afforded us the opportunity to hold a meaningful conversation about new innovations that are capturing the imagination of people around the world –and the government leaders who represent them.

But the heart of our discussion did not center on just the latest gadget. Instead, we dove into why these new technologies are leaving a lasting impression in cities across the globe.

We found that at a time when government leaders face declining budgets, aging infrastructures, and growing demands for better services, they are also overwhelmed with a glut of data they cannot use effectively.

Yet there are cities around the world that are solving some of the most intractable problems in areas ranging from transportation, energy, and public safety to education, health care and IT.

And they do it by implementing a combination of technology and innovation. It’s these kinds of “smart” solutions that will help to drive sustained economic growth in complex communities.

For example, attendees had a chance to interact on a mobile tablet with IBM’s Deep Thunder, a weather forecasting and modeling technology.

What makes Deep Thunder such an important tool is how it uses weather models to predict the impacts of weather. The technology is designed to help accurately pinpoint severe weather events with calculations as fine as every 1 square mile and up to 36 to 48 hours in advance.

This information helps businesses and governments tailor services, change routes, and deploy equipment to minimize the effects of major weather events.

This means reduced costs, improved services and better public safety.

We also demonstrated how advanced tax fraud analytics are helping to root out waste, fraud and abuse.

IBM’s Tax Collections Optimizer helps tax agency staffs optimize their collections of delinquent debtors. As a result, governments are able to review selected returns within the processing stream 10 times faster and identify questionable refunds before being paid. This has produced a savings of $1.6 billion dollars for New York State alone.

In addition, we saw how building intelligence into our transportation systems not only reduces traffic congestion headaches, but also enables governments to gather historical and real-time data so they can proactively address parking and transit needs. These new innovative approaches can help cities plan economic development, infrastructure projects, and special events.

By having the ability to analyze the vast quantities of data our cities generate, our leaders are helping their communities remain attractive and livable –and to do less with more.

It was exciting to see the energy in the room that evening, as technologists and lawmakers came together in the spirit of innovation for our country’s future. When we work together, we help to ensure the promise of Smarter Cities becomes a reality.

Technorati Tags: Analytics, Smarter Cities, Smarter Planet

Six months ago, the city of Nairobi, Kenya, was rocked by an explosion that left over 100 people dead. The cause: residents had scooped oil from a broken pipeline, hoping to later sell the product on the black market. The oil accidentally ignited, setting off the explosion.

The city was sent into turmoil. A power outage hindered efforts to communicate and rescue victims. Traffic was backed up, making rescue efforts even more difficult as emergency medical personnel battled against time to get to the victims. The water supply in the surrounding neighborhoods dwindled to a trickle as fire fighters used up the last drops of the resource to put out the fire.

The explosion and its aftermath show the vulnerabilities of cities when confronted with major disasters. But the situation didn’t have to be so bad. If Nairobi had had a system for managing disasters some of the loss of life and property could have been prevented.

Rio de Janeiro shows the way. The Brazilian city teamed with IBM to create an intelligent operations center, which serves as a model for how cities can improve management of their critical services. The IOC coordinates the activities of more than 30 municipal and state departments plus private utility and transportation companies. “You can imagine the impact that using a city-wide intelligence system would have had on the day of the Nairobi explosion. In seconds, city officials would have known exactly how to respond to the disaster and lives would have been saved” says Tony Mwai, country general manager, IBM East Africa.

Mwai led a roundtable discussion of government services in Africa in Nairobi on October 6, 2011. A white paper summarizing the takeaways from the conference,  A Vision of A Smarter City: How Nairobi Can Lead the Way into a Prosperous and Sustainable Future, was published today.

As Nairobi seeks to enhance its image as one of Africa’s most attractive business hubs, it continues to face the dual challenge of unprecedented population growth and over-stretched infrastructure. The doubling of the city’s population in the next ten years will introduce new challenges – chief among them the need for a streamlined response to safety and security issues.

Many gains have been made. For instance, car-jackings in the city have dropped by half due to more effective policing. Yet one of Nairobi’s biggest headaches remains its public safety record. With the increasing population, public safety concerns have grown as resources are simply too over-stretched to meet rising demand.

In Nairobi, residents have grown accustomed to 90% of all calls to emergency services going unanswered. In a city where the wealthy are able to buy their security by investing in electric fences and high-tech alarm systems, the poor are often at the mercy of thugs who prey on them.  Nairobi is now looking to technology to resolve its security issues.

A lot could be done without spending a tremendous amount of money. For instance, private companies have already covered over 90% of the city with cameras that are used to pinpoint security black spots and reduce crime. But because none of these private firms share these resources with each other, or allow that information to be viewed by the government, the impact of these impressive investments is limited.

The white paper suggests that bringing these two groups together by deploying a city-wide video surveillance system would allow all stakeholders to harness this vast network of cameras to the good of the city. These pieces of infrastructure could be instrumented to produce valuable data that can be used as intelligence to help make better public safety management decisions in real time.

In addition, by enhancing the use of analytics solutions to manage events like the Sinai fire, public safety officials could bring together vast amounts of relevant information to protect the public’s safety.

The Rio initiative is already capturing the imagination of Kenya’s government. Officials envision a future city that will be able to better handle disasters like Sinai–speeding response and saving lives.. “We look to Rio as the future we want, a city where technology allows public safety to be more accessible to residents,” said Bitange Ndemo, Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Information.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Technorati Tags: Anthony Mwai, Bitange Ndemo, IBM, Kui Kinyanjui, Rio Intelligent Operations Center