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By Martin Kelly
Partner, IBM Venture Capital Group
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. Continue Reading »
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Steve Hamm in
- Analytics
- business analytics
- Government Services
- Inventions
- Leadership
- new intelligence
- Smarter Buildings
- Smarter Cities
- Smarter Industries
- Smarter Planet
- Smarter Public Safety
- Smarter Systems
- Smarter Traffic
- Smarter Transportation
- Smarter Utilities
- Smarter Water
- Smarter Water Management
- Smarter Work
- sustainability
- urban planning
Rio De Janeiro is a bustling metropolis in a booming country–and, increasingly, an example of how government and business leaders can cooperate to make cities work better. Join the live blog today and tomorrow for coverage of speeches, panels and hallway discussions.
Here’s Sam Palmisano’s speech:
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By Marie-Anne (Kui) Kinyanjui
IBM external relations, Kenya
What seems like a random question was actually a something that was being asked this week by leaders from government and business that attended the Smarter Cities Roundtable in Nairobi this week. Stakeholders from the Kenyan government, private sector and civil society gathered to identify Nairobi’s most significant challenges in order to frame discussion on technology could ease the city’s transitional growth.
In the next 20 years, Nairobi’s population – already the largest on the East coast of Africa – is set to exceed that of these three mega cities in coming years. The Kenyan capital’s population will balloon by 65 per cent over the next decade to stand at between 8-10 million, presenting a unique challenge to a city that is already struggling under to accommodate the needs of its residents. The main challenges are transportation, utilities, safety and security and urban planning.
So as leaders from government and business look for best practice from other cities for how have tackled their urban challenges, the examples of Rio, London and Singapore are actually more relevant than we might have suspected.
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By Robert Atkinson
President
Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.
Robert Atkinson, president of the non-partisan public policy think-tank ITIF, today moderated a panel of experts on emerging technologies in the fields of health care, transportation and energy at IBM’s Frontiers of IT Capitol Hill briefing.
Here’s the Washington Post’s Post Tech blog curtain-raiser on the event.
Recently considerable attention has been drawn to the emergence of “Big Data”—large scale data sets that businesses are using to unlock new value using today’s computing and communications power. As a McKinsey Global Institute study recently showed, Big Data offers a wide range of commercial opportunities in virtually every sector of the economy for the United States. To take one example, the authors estimate that better use of big data in health care could generate an additional $300 billion in long-term value, with approximately two-thirds of that coming from a direct reduction in national health care expenditures.
The use of Big Data should not be confined to just the private sector; data offers incredible new opportunities to the public sector as well. Policymakers have the opportunity to use Big Data to improve government in areas such as public safety, public health, public utilities and public transportation. ITIF has discussed many of these opportunities before.
Consider the following:
- Electric power utilities can use data analytics and smart meters to better manage resources and avoid blackouts,
- Food inspectors can use data to better track meat and produce safety from farm to fork ,
- Public health officials can use health data to detect infectious disease outbreaks,
- Regulators can track pharmaceutical and medical device safety and effectiveness through better data analytics,
- Police departments can use data analytics to target crime hotspots and prevent crime waves,
- Public utilities can use sensors to collect data on water and sewer usage to detect leaks and reduce water consumption,
- First responders can use sensors, GPS, cameras and better communication systems to let police and fire fighters better protect citizens when responding to emergencies, and
- State departments of transportation can use data to reduce traffic, more efficiently deploy resources, and implement congestion pricing systems
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Richard Silberman in
Zia Yusuf, CEO of Streetline, Inc., a provider of innovative parking solutions
Zia Yusuf, CEO of Streetline, Inc., a provider of innovative parking solutions
Another person for a smarter planet
Ask Zia Yusuf what he does for a living and he’ll likely say, “I’m in the parking business.” More precisely, he’s in the business of trying to put an end to parking as we know it and utterly transform one of the most familiar and frustrating acts of daily life.
According to Yusuf, an estimated 30 percent of traffic in cities is caused by people driving around in search of parking. As CEO of San Francisco startup Streetline, Inc., Yusuf is working to deploy sensors in cities around the world to guide drivers to open parking spots and help municipalities better manage their parking and traffic resources.
Yusuf’s ultimate goal is nothing less than to change how people work and live across the world. “Pointing drivers to available parking will save them time, alleviate congestion and reduce carbon emissions,” Yusuf said. “It means happier drivers and greener cities.” Continue Reading »
By Naveen Lamba
Intelligent Transportation Leader, IBM Global Business Services
“Carmageddon” wasn’t the epic traffic jam many were predicting, but it was definitely a hot topic of conversation on Twitter over the weekend.
Indeed, the temporary closure of the I-405 highway in Los Angeles sparked thousands of tweets, which IBM evaluated using sophisticated analytics software that divided the postings into two categories – positive sentiment and negative sentiment.
The analysis, summarized in the charts below, indicates the power of social media as a marketplace of instant opinion, as well as the ability of modern technology to gauge those opinions in real time.
The above graph looks at the percentage of positive Tweets (blue line) and negative Tweets (red line) about Carmageddon from Friday to Monday morning. Negative sentiment starts out higher than positive sentiment at the start of the weekend. By Sunday positive Tweets begin an upsurge, as negative Tweets decline. By Monday morning, positive comments (like “no traffic!”) outnumber negative (like “Carmageddon stinks!”).
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Steve Hamm in
IBM has plenty of company when it comes to deep concern and deep thinking about the future of cities. Today, at the Intelligent Cities Forum in Washington, D.C., hundreds of urban planners, city leaders and data mavens are gathering to share insights on ways to make cities more successful and sustainable using data, analytics, collaboration and foresight. The A Smarter Planet blog will feature live blogging from the event, so please return here frequently to see updates.
To see a live video of the event, click here. To learn more about the event, click here. To follow or participate via Twitter, use #icities.
Anne Altman, general manager, Global Public Sector, IBM, talks about why cities are so important to having a sustainable planet.
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Chris Luongo in
When looking back at IBM’s 100 years, there are a number of examples across road, rail, air and sea where new 
technologies and new approaches are changing how people and things move from here…to there.
Stockholm, Sweden, the subject of today’s Icon of Progress, is a city of islands. There are 14 small town-sized islands, where citizens can stroll across short car and pedestrian bridges and boats slowly navigate through the archipelago.
Traffic congestion had been a growing aggravation there for years, with over half a million cars traveling into the city every weekday. Simply building more roads was’t the answer. Road building could not keep pace with the increased demand, and the environment wouldn’t be able to sustain the impact. Authorities encouraged people to make greater use of public transport. But still, the bottlenecks got worse.
But then we learn how Stockholm and other urban centers around the world have discovered that traffic isn’t just a line of cars: it’s a web of connections. With IBM’s help, these cities are infusing intelligence into their entire transportation systems — streets, bridges, intersections, signs, signals and tolls. And now they’re seeing significant drops in congestion and pollution.
