Technorati Tags: Bitcarrier, ibm smartcamp, Martin Mendez

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

Technorati Tags: IBM, Rio

Here’s Sam Palmisano’s speech:

Click here to view the embedded video.

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The Start:

2:20 p.m.      Welcome by Ricardo Pelegrini, General Manager, IBM Brazil

Two years ago, IBM started talking about a smarter plant. “Today, it’s an urgent necessity for cities to be smarter.”

Around one million people worldwide migrate to cities every week. By 2050, 70% of the world’s population will be living in cities. This urbanization represents great economic opportunities and also important social and environment challenges.

Nowadays, cities consume 75% of the world’s energy, release 80% of polluting gases and waste 20% of their water due to leaks and inefficiencies in the infrastructure. “The good news is we can change our cities to make them more sustainable, and achieve growth and progress at the same time.”

Technology is available that can be used to enhance urban security, decrease traffic jams and avoid the waste of energy and water.

In the next two days, let’s analyze how cities are modernizing their systems and their infrastructure to encourage economic development, generate innovation and improve the education of the population.

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2:55 p.m.   SmarterCities: Crucibles of Global Progress, Sam Palmisano, CEO of IBM

We have come to Rio because it is a compelling example of a new kind of actor that has appeared on the world stage – the smarter global city.

We face many challenges today. “It can seem as if the world is getting the better of our leaders.” But we see that progress is still happening and it’s being driven by forward-thinking mayors and other innovators in business, universities and non-governmental organizations in cities.

How is it that mayors are getting things done, while other leaders seem stuck?

–“These city leaders are non-ideological. They get things done.”

–Smarter city leaders think in terms of systems. An example is Rio’s intelligent operations center, which  coordinates information from more than 20 city departments.

–Smarter city leaders think – and manage – for the long term.

Amidst all the tumult in the world today, there is another model taking shape. This new generation of leaders is seizing upon the vast quantities of data their cities generate to drive growth and sustainability. “The flip side of every crisis is a vast new opportunity for progress.”

I believe future historians will look back on this moment as the dawn of a new golden age of innovation, widely shared economic growth and global citizenship.

So, let’s use the next two days to think together about what this new urban age could be and then roll up our sleeves for a collaborative work session on how to build it.

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3:20 p.m.   Special Address: The SmarterCities Agenda: The Transformation of Rio de Janeiro, by Eduardo Paes, mayor of Rio

“People talk about the triumph of the city, because it’s the place where people can fulfill their destinies.”

Cities start with services that meet people’s needs. Smarter cities provide a better way to organize and interact in positive ways. Technology progress allows use to got to places we never could go before.

The creative class gathers in cities, and promotes its development.

But there are huge challenges, such as violence and environmental impacts. We face many challenges. We in Rio see these problems on a large scale.

We have prioritized the improvement of services, so we have focused on investments in technology. I monitor the progress of the city with technology every day.

I don’t know how earlier mayors were able to manage their cities without the help of these technologies.

We have been able to increase the collection of taxes without having to increase taxes, for instance.

In future days we’ll reach even higher steps.

Our intelligent operations center allows us to integrate many of the operations of the city so we can provide better services. We have been able to organize ourselves in the face of chaos—when big storms come.

For 400 years public authorities weren’t able to respond to floods and landslides. But now we can mitigate these catastrophies. We can manage risks. We can coordinate better.

We simulated heavy rains and flooding. The control center connects the mayor’s house. I had to wake up at 5 a.m. and participate in the simulation. It was sunny, but we simulated a storm. This is the kind of capability we’ll have.

We have weather information coming in. We have 400 video cameras around the city, and more are coming. IBM scientists created a high tech tool for modeling weather in the city and predict where the rains will fall, so we can react.

Thanks to the control center, we now can have constant awareness and monitoring of what’s going on in the city.

We leaders can sleep because the control center never sleeps. “It’s driving change for the way we manage the city.”

All the departments are connected up 24/7 and they’re aware of what’s going on, and they coordinating their activities. It shows that humans do need to work together.

Rio had a brain drain for a while, but now it has the capacity to attract back and retain these talents. It’s no longer just a tourist spot. Now foreigners are leaving places where there’s a crisis and coming here for opportunities.

We’re developing public-private partnerships.

Rio’s doors are open.

We hope that Rio will be one of the smart cities of the world.

———————–

3:45 p.m. Eduardo Paes, mayor of Rio, talks with Sam Palmisano, CEO of IBM and Fareed Zakaria, CNN host.

Paes:

“Every city needs to decide what it wants to be. After Rio lost the capital of the country it spent 40 years about what we weren’t any more.”

“Cities are where the world is run.”

Every city has its own assets. In Rio, the environment is key. People decide to move here or invest here based on it.

“For a while, it was very popular to be a gang leader in some of our communities. They felt they were robbing from the rich and giving to the poor.” The situation got very bad.

Now we drive the criminals out of the favelas, one after another. Then we bring in the police and social services. We can transform society.

20 years ago people would say don’t touch the favelas at all. These days, we have a different situation. We can’t have more favelas. We can provide housing for the people. We have to provide transportation so they can get to work faster. Today, it might take 3 hours for poor people to get to work.

We have 600 favelas, They won’t go away. We’ll leave people where they are and bring them public safety, public works and social work.

In 2020, we’ll have all the favelas urbanized.

Palmisano:

You’re going to create a modern transportation system. I encourage you to think of it end to end, coordinate the different modes of transportation, so people can make connections and save time.

“This is systemic thinking. It’s a total system, not just a collection of separate elements.”

Predictability is key. People need that.

——————

Here’s a video of the panel discussion:

Click here to view the embedded video.

——————-

Here’s a look at how IBM worked with the Rio to set up an intelligent operations center:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Nearly a year since inaugurating its city operations center, Rio is working with IBM to add new capabilities to city’s emergency response system by giving citizens information that will help them better manage their daily lives.

The new automated alert system will notify city officials and emergency personnel when changes occur in the flood and landslide forecast for the city. Under the previous system, notifications were manually relayed. The new alert system is expected to drastically reduce the reaction times to emergency situations by using instantaneous mobile communications, including automated email notifications and instant messaging, to reach emergency personnel and citizens.

The new alert system, developed by IBM’s Software Labs, can track the receipt of messages to ensure response is immediate and effective. Because responses to each emergency are tracked from start to finish, the alert system also provides a wealth of data available for analysis after the fact.

Another benefit Rio citizens can enjoy today is access to daily data feeds from the Rio Operations Center. The Center’s profile on Facebook and Twitter provide frequent updates on weather and traffic, as well as recommended alternative routes around the city on days of special events including concerts, soccer matches and festivals.

Citizens can follow the Rio Operations Center updates on Twitter @OperacoesRio and Facebook at Centro de Operações Rio.

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4:50 p.m. Special Address: The Transformation of Mega Cities, by  Johnny Araya Monge, mayor, San Jose City, Costa Rica.

The world’s urban population is already larger than the rural population. By 2050 it will be more than 70%.

Our big challenge will be to design a new urban paradigm. We want cities that are more democratic, more sustainable and more competitive. In the knowledge-based society, this means smarter cities. So we need smarter administration of the world’s cities.

We’re talking about the transformation of mega cities. ‘Mega cities are now a mega problem.”

All of the cities with 12 and 15 million inhabitants are in the Third World, or emerging nations. Poverty and social inclusion are part of the mix. This makes city administration very difficult.

We have the capacity to avoid such large cities being developed. We need a new paradigm for cities. We need to break down the definition of what is city and what is countryside, and what environments are protected.

It seems smart to encourage development of second-tier cities. Ideally countries should have a network of intermediate size cities and towns that are interconnected.

“Think of cities as a habitat, a space shared with plants and animals.” There should be agricultural areas, ecological protected areas and urban areas blended together.

In Costa Rica, we’re trying to reverse some of our old ideas about urbanism. Many cities were created around the idea of the freeways. These cities are spread out—they’re inefficient.  They also lead to social segregation. “A city must be a shared territory for all.”

We’re promoting growth in high-density ways, so the city is more compact. “The compact cities are always the most successful ones in the world.”

We’re using a lot of renewable energy sources, and we’re aiming to be carbon neutral as a nation.

We’re repopulating and transforming the downtown part of the city. It was abandoned. It was taken by gangs and drug leaders. We’re now rebuilding the social tissue of the downtown. We’re also promoting urban forests, using native trees along streets and avenues.

We’re putting in a tramway, and creating pedestrian streets. We’re rehabilitating the area where gangs and drug dealers were. “Thousands of people are walking downtown and it’s booming.”

The context:

Here’s Costa Rica President Laura Chinchilla talking about establishing a responsible country:

Click here to view the embedded video.

—————

Update:

6:00 p.m. Special Address: At the Intersection of Globalization and Urbanization, by Fareed Zakaria, CNN host.

I want to paint the broader picture for you. At the end of the day it’s all about improving the living standards of people around the world—giving people access to the American Dream or the Brazilian Dream.

Growing up in India, I was fascinated about the wealth, the opportunity, the dynamism of America. That’s what attracted most people to America. Behind it was the freedom and rule of law and the constitution.

Today in the US you see a lot of pessimism. But the American Dream is alive and well in Rio, in Shanghai. This is where the optimists are.

You’re seen a switch from closed systems to open systems, from isolation to engagement. These changes unleashed political stability and a reduction in warfare; economic convergence—globalization and the adoption of best economic and business practices; and technological connectivity—the information revolution.

It unleashes enormous opportunities. Brazil has been able to take advantage of these changes and plug into the global economy and play.

The challenge for the future is this extraordinary opportunity. Everybody is moving through this at the same time. A lot of people in Asia and Latin America prospered. Governments just had to do simple things, and they got economic growth.

Now you have reached some degree of saturation of the easy path to rising per capital GDP. We’re entering a more challenging phase.

“This is the final phase of industrialization. Everything in your society has to be modernized. Everything has to be smart.”

It’s a lot more than supply and demand. You have to straighten out your infrastructure, your legal system. You have to improve productivity growth.

You have to deal with traffic and pollution. You can only deal with that with improved labor productivity. That’s increasingly difficult to do it because you live in a competitive world. “You’re in a competitive race with other cities around the world.”

To see where real growth is happening, don’t look at the mega cities of the world. There are a few exceptions, like New York and London, because of the financial industry. The real growth is in the 600 middle-tier cities underneath them. They may form themselves into clusters, tapping new transportation and communications infrastructures.

In the US, American companies like IBM are doing extraordinarily well in this global world. They master the shifts in technology. But the average American worker, the American city—they’re struggling.

People in the United States will have to adapt like hell. I’m optimistic, though.

Look at all the things happening around the world. It’s easy to get gloomy. But the pressures of globalization are forcing innovation, productivity gains and better governance.

“Ultimately this is going to have a beneficial effect.”

“This is all about unleashing human talent in away that we’ve never seen before and on a scale we’ve never seen before.”

——

Here’s Fareed’s speech:

Click here to view the embedded video.

———-

Here are wrap-up comments by Bruno Di Leo, IBM’s general manager for the growth markets.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Technorati Tags: Brazil, IBM, Rio de Janeiro

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.

A simple drive through Nairobi today will expose you to some of the issues at hand. The IBM Commuter Pain study has already flagged Nairobi as the fourth most painful commute in the world, with some residents reporting traffic jams lasting as long as 90 minutes to cover just five miles. The pollution from the clogged and congested traffic as well as the condition of the roads and sidewalks makes walking or cycling almost inconceivable.

As Christian Schlosser, Chief of the UN-Habitat’s Urban Transport Section put it “there are basically too many cars on roads designed for ten times less traffic.”

And with a lack of investment in public transport systems, 75 percent of vehicles in Nairobi travel passengerless.

The parking situation in Nairobi is no better. IBM’s first parking survey released recently showed that drivers in Nairobi take an average of 31.7 minutes to find a parking spot against a global average of 19.8 minutes.

Energy management is also a problem today in Nairobi – energy fluctuations are common, with Nairobi experiencing 11,000 blackouts every month. Inefficient utility systems also lead to higher energy prices which impair economic development.

Security remains a constant worry for Nairobi’s residents in a city where 9 out of 10 calls to state emergency services go unanswered and residents are increasingly turning to private security and ambulance providers when they are in trouble.

The roundtable discussion this week provoked a pivotal discussion on how to get both public and private sector to pull together to meet a joint objective of transforming Nairobi into a Smarter City. For example, it emerged during the discussion that both public and private sectors are currently building emergency control rooms in Nairobi in separate, uncoordinated projects.

In a country known for its quick and transformative adoption of modern technologies to its own unique needs, the roundtable was quick to latch onto the low hanging fruits.

Tony Mwai, IBM’s Country Manager who hosted the event, gave a concrete example of how technology could provide an innovative solution to some of Nairobi’s congestion problems. With over 70 per cent of the population already on mobile networks, the density of mobile signals could be used to indicate where congestion is heaviest.

Another area of interest in the discussion was how social media could help to strengthen the relationship between government departments, citizens, private sector companies and civil society organizations.

The round table session was moderated by noted financial analyst Aly-Khan Satchu and was attended by high level policy makers and CEOs from a number of sectors including: Dr. Bitange Ndemo, Permanent Secretary for Information; Eddy Njoroge, Managing Director, KENGEN; Wolfgang Fengler, Chief Economist, World Bank; Steven Oundo, Architectural Society of Kenya; Christian Schlosser, Chief of Urban Transport Section, UN-Habitat, Lucas Ndolo, KK Security and local entrepreneur Esther Passaris.

The final outcomes from the roundtable discussion will be shared with the wider public in a white paper and video film later this year.

—-

Here’s a minidocumentary about how IBM’s Corporate Service Corps has helped Kenyan government leaders transform government services.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Technorati Tags: IBM, Kenya

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

Better use of data can help government agencies, from city agencies to federal bureaucracies, operate more efficiently, create more transparency, and make more informed decisions.  And government can use cloud computing to more efficiently develop online systems that provide anytime, anywhere access to information. However, government officials should do more to spur uses of data. Taking advantage of these opportunities will require federal government leadership, such as the Department of Commerce creating a data policy office to spur data innovation and overcome obstacles to adoption, all the while protecting privacy.  And going forward, government agencies will increasingly have to deal with issues such as data security and identity management, so these issues do  not become impediments to successful utilization of data analytics. Local governments can help pioneer the use of data as well.  For example, the city of Boston city sponsored the development of a mobile app “Street Bump” to automatically determine where potholes are based on data collected using citizen’s smart phones equipped with GPS and accelerometers. Tools like these are helping create “smart cities” and build a world that is alive with information.

Although there have been many successes in this area, much more can be done.  For example, in homeland security, law enforcement must deal with a changing threat landscape.  While corporations and individuals can increasingly use better technology to communicate and store data security, criminals can also use these same tools.  As a result, law enforcement is increasingly confronting the “Going Dark” problem where they have less access to investigative data, not because of a lack of legal authority, but because of technological hurdles.  Yet while law enforcement may have a reduced ability to intercept some types of communication, they now have many more sources of data, such as transactional data, to use to detect threats.  As ITIF discussed at an event in 2010 following the Christmas Day terrorist attempt, the intelligence community still needs to develop better analytical tools to “connect the dots” and allow intelligence officers to do a better job. Similarly in many other sectors, Big Data offers government opportunities to reinvent how to operate effectively.

Overall, more investment in data infrastructure and analytics will enable government to better provide and efficiently deliver values and services to its citizens.

Technorati Tags: IBM, Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, Robert Atkinson

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.”

Envisioning cities filled with sensors

Streetline pioneered wireless parking sensors, according to Yusuf — but parking is just the first step in his vision to use low-cost sensors to create smarter cities. Once Streetline’s network is initially deployed for parking, it can easily be adapted to support other types of sensors, such as pollution monitors.

“An informed planet is a smarter planet, and sensors hold the key to getting the information we need to support better decision-making and improve the quality of life in our cities,” Yusuf said.

“We started with parking because it provides a large return on investment that we can use toward future initiatives,” Yusuf said. “Parking may not sound glamorous, but it’s a huge challenge for cities and consumers and is a significant business opportunity. It’s a sector that has changed very little in decades and is ripe for innovation.”

From big banks to small change (as in parking meters, that is)

Yusuf did not start out as a start-up kind of guy. In joining Streetline as CEO in July 2010, he made a sharp turn from a career that included Goldman Sachs and The World Bank, followed by ten years as an executive vice president at business software giant SAP AG.

“I joined Streetline because I wanted to do something that used very high-end technology to solve some very basic problems, and I wanted to do it in a way that impacts people’s lives on a day-to-day basis,” Yusuf said. “There are very few times in your career that you have the opportunity to potentially change an industry — and that’s exactly what we’re doing.”

Streetline's Parker (TM) application, which guides drivers to open parking spots

Yusuf’s passion for making a difference extends well beyond the workplace. As an associate consulting professor at the Stanford University Institute of Design, he teaches “Liberation Technology” — a course where his students, in conjunction with the University of Nairobi in Kenya, develop mobile applications to support health, education and economic development.

When parking becomes a pleasure

Looking ahead, Yusuf is confident that guided parking will become the norm within the next few years. It is currently available in parts of New York City, Los Angeles, Washington D.C. and many other US cities, with growing interest in cities worldwide.

Streetline’s next move is to create an integrated parking platform to connect parking providers, such as garages, shopping malls and universities, with parking consumers. Providers will be able to set rates and offer reservations, while consumers will be able to check real-time parking availability and make mobile payments, among other capabilities.

“The whole concept of guided parking really captures the imagination,” Yusuf said. “When I’m driving and say that I am now going to make a right turn and there will be three empty parking spaces — and there they are — it blows people away.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Streetline uses sensors to guide drivers to open parking spaces and provide cities with valuable data to help them strategically manage their parking assets. Drivers in a growing number of cities can use Streetline’s Parker™ application, available for iPhone and Android smartphones and compatible tablets, to receive real-time data locating open parking spots (integration with in-car navigation systems will be coming in the future). Cities use Streetline’s live sensor data to get an accurate picture of parking occupancy and turnover and to put parking data into the hands of residents and visitors. Streetline won IBM’s 2010 SmartCamp competition and was named IBM Global Entrepreneur of the Year.

Streetline CEO Zia Yusuf, who grew up in Pakistan, is also on the board of Developments in Literacy (DIL), a non-profit organization that provides quality education to disadvantaged children in the underdeveloped regions of Pakistan. In addition, he co-founded IMUKA, a Tanzania-based music group whose mission is to share the music of Tanzania with the world and foster economic independence across the country’s rural communities.

Technorati Tags: parking, streetline, zia yusuf

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!”).

The Twitter data can also be segmented another way – into major categories about Carmegeddon and related topics – and then analyzed for sentiment, either positive or negative.

Sentiment analysis

As the chart above shows, of those commenting on the early reopening of the 405, 17 percent registered negative comments versus only 12 percent positive. Given the hype and the car culture predominant in LA, it was surprising to see there was not more pronounced negative and positive sentiment around the fact that the highway was opening several hours earlier than local officials originally stated. The large amount of neutral comments (neither positive nor negative) suggested that many people seemed to wish that Carmageddon and the congestion-free roads could stick around longer. Could it be that LA drivers aren’t as in love with their cars as is often thought?

Many tweets focused on how light traffic was during the weekend. In the subcategories referring to the lack of “gridlock,” 41 percent were positive, versus 6 percent negative. In a related category – “no traffic” – 29 percent were positive, versus 14 percent negative. In this case, officials’ worst fears didn’t come true.

We were also able to measure the “volume” of the conversation when we analyzed the number of tweets on topics related to Carmageddon without regard for sentiment analysis:

Ultimately, insight into social media could help a city or government better serve its constituents. The ability to monitor and analyze social conversation in real-time can help them see how constituents are responding to policy decisions or how they might need to vary their outreach across different channels to get the word out about a highway closure like the one in LA this past weekend. This could also serve as early warning system for governments around special events and unexpected occurrences.

For example, public safety officials could use this technology as part of a rapid response system for flooding, earthquakes and other natural disasters; or to identify areas of public services delivery that need improvement.

Technorati Tags: IBM, Smarter Transportation, traffic congestion, twitter

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.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Anne Altman, general manager, Global Public Sector, IBM, talks about why cities are so important to having a sustainable planet.

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5:51 p.m. Closing Remarks

Chase W. Rynd, president and executive director, National Building Museum, announces that Data Materialized wins the prize for the best of The 24-Hour City Project experiments.

Also, an Intelligent Cities exhibition is coming.

Also a book.

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5:15 p.m. Town Hall Meeting
A panel of municipal leaders discuss how we can collectively build intelligent cities.

One of the key points is the recognition that many American cities were built after the introduction of the automobile, and their design (or lack thereof) is based on the availability of cheap gasoline. So how do cities designed for the automobile proceed when that approach is no longer sustainable?

One example is Raleigh, North Carolina, which got the nickname “Spraleigh” because of its sprawl pattern. The city has very little available land for development and an aging population that won’t  be driving in the not-too-distant future.

Mitchell Silver, director of planning for Raleigh, says the city leaders began their long-term planning process with a series of discussions, which included a heavy dose of citizen input, about what it means to be a 21st century city. “A city has to understand its purpose. The public has to understand its purpose. The elected officials need to understand its purpose. Then you can understand what it is as a system,” he says.

In the end, they came up with a plan to develop 8 growth centers that will accommodate most of the community’s growth. They were able to get 96% support from the public. One crucial factor: They showed that the community would save hundreds of millions of dollars over the next 30 years by pursuing this plan.

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5:00 p.m. Designing a Collaborative Built Environment

“I never let the data trump my intuition about what my community values.”

–Maurice Cox, past mayor of Charlottesville, Virginia and former director of design at the National Endowment for the Arts.

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4:16 p.m. Designing a Collaborative Built Environment

Nicholas de Monchaux, architect, urbanist, writer, and assistant professor of Architecture & Urban Design at University of California, Berkeley: “Recently, I was asked who is the Jane Jacobs of social media? Well, Jane Jacobs was the Jane Jacobs of social media. She was the first to identify the layers of urban social relationships that are the essence of social media just like they are the essence of healthy cities.”

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3:55 pm – Thought Vignette: Community and Social Interaction in the Wireless City

Keith Hampton

Keith Hampton, assistant professor, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, is exploring the social benefits of using new technology in cities. He is presenting the results of his studies seeking to address three questions:

- Do new communication technologies reduce the use of traditional settings such as public spaces?
- Do new communication technologies reduce in-person interaction with others?
- Do new communication technologies make communication possible where it wasn’t before?

Hampton’s  data shows that people who use a variety of new media are more likely to visit public spaces – for example, bloggers spend a lot of time going to parks and cafes, and interacting socially. As a result of this kind of socialization, people have more diverse networks, and are physically and mentally healthier, creating higher levels of trust and tolerance.

There is a perception, he says, that people have less serendipity and pay less attention to the world around them due to social media. But his study shows that while that is true to a degree, many of the things people do online tend to be socially active, for example, increasing political participation.

In one of his studies, 25 percent of those interviewed had not visited the public space before wireless Internet was available at that location. Seventy percent of those who previously visited said they visited more often due to availability of wireless internet. And they almost always came alone, yet they are interacting with a lot of people online while they were in those public spaces– mostly interacting on social networking Web sites. Ten percent observed in an extended interaction with a stranger; 12 percent participated in a more modest social exchange;  and 1 in 6 maintained contact over time, forming a relationship.

In answering the question: Can social media make communication possible where it wasn’t before, Hampton tested lower-income neighborhoods with a low likelihood of access to technology.  The study found that in low-income neighborhoods, new communication technologies can help produce local cohesion and collective action in new and exciting ways.

The bottom line? The built environment hasn’t declined in importance and new technology doesn’t detract from the built environment.

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2:40 p.m. Imagining a Healthier City

A question to members of the panel: Look out 50 years. What do we need to anticipate now?

Climate change, says Patrick L. Kinney, professor of environmental health sciences, Columbia University. “The scientific community is essentially unanimous in the conclusion that we have seen climate change over the past 30 years, and no matter what we do we won’t be able to change things in the next 30 years,” he says.

Larger hurricanes are coming, like Katrina, because of the warming of the oceans. At the same time, cities along the seacoast will have to deal with rising sea levels.

If you’re interested in exploring some ideas about how cities can reach to rising and increasingly angry seas, check out this design project, Rising Currents, sponsored by New York’s Museum of Modern Art–the output of which was put on display in the museum’s galleries last year.

The project brought together five interdisciplinary teams to re-envision the coastlines of New York and New Jersey around New York Harbor at a time in the future when the sea level will be much higher. Their visions of the city of the future give new meaning to the concept of  “open space.”

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2:20 p.m. Imagining a Healthier City

Don’t leave home. That’s the advice of William Lucy, professor of Urban and Environmental Planning, University of Virginia. He says the mortal threats to humans in metropolitan areas area traffic accidents and murders. Most murders happen at home, but most traffic accidents, of course, don’t. Since there are many more traffic fatalities in metros than there are murders, the more time you spend at home, the less likely you are to die an early death.

That also means that the dangerous areas in a metropolitan area are the ones that are considered to be safest—the outer areas. That’s where you get the traffic fatalities.

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12:36 p.m.  During the lunch break

In one of the National Business Museum’s galleries, they’re presenting some experiments that have come out of  The 24-Hour City Project, launched in D.C., which project organizers call “a wild experiment to hack the city.”

The purpose of the project is to explore the intersection of the built environment, data, the arts and information technology. In a beta conducted in recent weeks, teams competed to develop physical and digital interventions at the museum, which were opened to the public over the weekend.

One cool one: Data Materialized. A group gathered data about the education levels of people in D.C., arranged by location, and represented it in a three-dimensional graphic—which they displayed in physical form in one of the National Building Museum galleries. Notice in the video the huge spike of education in D.C.’s Georgetown neighborhood.

Click here to view the embedded video.

In November, the 24-Hour City Project competition will launch citywide in D.C. and, the organizers hope there will be parallel events in Boston, New York, Chicago and elsewhere around the world.

To see what’s going on, visit the Intelligent Cities Tumblr blog.

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12:25 p.m. Regionally Thinking: Transportation, Affordability, and Equity

Robert Puentes, senior fellow, Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program, says one of the problems is that suburban towns think about their relationships to the cities and not how they relate to one another. We have hub-and-spoke transit systems. “If you’re trying to get between suburbs you have tremendous challenges,” he says.

He says we have to fundamentally rethink and remake our transport corridors so it makes it easier to live work shop and play: “We have to remake the suburbs for the 21^st century.”

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12:00 p.m. Regionally Thinking: Transportation, Affordability and Equity

Robert Puentes, senior fellow, Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program, recently concluded a study of accessibility to work in metropolitan areas in the United States. The good news is that 70% of metro residents had some sort of transit. The bad news is that the transit isn’t convenient enough. On average, people can only get to 30% of the jobs in their metropolitan area within 90 minutes.

The conclusion I draw from this info is that you can’t solve the problem by brute force–building a lot more rail or other transit infrastructure. You’ll be able to move quicker and cheaper if you concentrate in the near-term on better coordination of what exists, which requires collaboration between different regional and municipal transit organizations. The transit systems have to not only intersect but their schedules need to sync up.

Scott Bernstein, president and founder, Center for Neighborhood Technology, says, “We need a jobs-to-people strategy, not just a people-to-jobs strategy.” He urges government leaders to provide incentives to companies to move the jobs to where the people are. That’s much less expensive than making massive new investments in mass transit systems.

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11:15 a.m. Thought Vignette: Democracy and Inclusion in the Intelligent Cities

Ceasar McDowell, professor of the Practice of Community Development, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, explores ways of democratizing data and city development.

He argues that in the social networking world, people, not corporations, should have should have control over their data. He proposes what he calls a “personal digital commons.” Individuals should be able to place digital information about them on the Web in four buckets: free use, limited use, collective community use and no use. Once people have decided how their information can be used, the way is clear to start using it in potentially powerful ways.

He has the concept of “collective framing.” Rather than organizations or city governments setting agendas and announcing them to the public, why not engage the public in setting the agenda from the get-go?

He says even if you ask people to provide input  via an online survey, the way you ask the questions is limiting. He encourages open-ended questions.

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10:10 a.m. The City as a Lab.

Government is in ill-repute in some quarters these days, but good government leadership is absolutely vital to leading and coordinating the development of more successful cities.

Dustin Haisler, director of government innovation, Spigit, and former CIO, Manor, Texas, says government leadership is vital, even at a time when municipal governments are pressed financially. “Don’t accept the constraints you’re given,” he says, adding later: “The city is a lab now. They’re experimenting and solving problems.”

Mark Cleverley, director of strategy, Global Government Industry, IBM, says, “I challenge the notion that government isn’t innovative. You have to find a way to let those people free and work together across city agencies. The message has to be that it’s okay for that to happen.”

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9:55 a.m. The City as a Lab.

Mark Cleverley, director of strategy, Global Government Industry, IBM, says,  “We can think of creating solutions in many more places than we could just a few years ago.”

We’re engaged in smarter cities projects all over the world.

One example is IBM has been working with the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to help city leaders transform the management of their operations.

The impetus for the overhaul was a series of floods and mudslides that claimed the lives of 100 people back in April 2010 combined with preparations for the World Cup in 2014 and the Olympics in 2016. The city and IBM are collaborating to create what Rio leaders call their City Operations Center, where they’re integrating information from more than 20 city departments for for real-time visualization, monitoring and analysis of incidents across the city. It will help meteorologists, geological surveyors, field operations people and security managers work together to dramatically speed emergency responsiveness—no matter what happens.

As part of the agreement, IBM Research scientists have developed a high-resolution weather forecasting and hydrological modeling system, which can predict heavy rains up to 48 hours in advance. Essentially, they’ve created a giant mathematical model of how the city’s weather interacts with its water management systems.

The center is the first in the world to integrate all the stages of a crisis management situation: from the prediction, mitigation and preparedness, to the immediate response to events, and finally to capture feedback from the system to be used in future incidents.

Rio Operations Center

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9:35 a.m. Keynote Conversation: What Makes an Intelligent City?

Susan Piedmont-Palladino, curator, National Building Museum: “I look forward to the day when a city isn’t considered beautiful unless it’s sustainable. You won’t get an architectural award unless you pay attention to how the building is oriented toward the sun.”

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9:17 a.m. Keynote Conversation: What Makes an Intelligent City?

One of the keys to making cities manageable and data really useful is developing technology systems that allow city leaders to see data, make sense of it, and make better decisions based on their new knowledge.

IBM has has been working with cities for decades, and, three years ago, when it launched its Smarter Planet strategy, it began bringing new thinking and new technologies to bear on cities’ problems and opportunities—combining the availability sensors for collecting data, the ubiquity of networks and new analytical software tools. Initially, most of the software had to be written from scratch.

Not so any more. Today, coinciding with the Intelligent Cities Forum, the company introduced a new software product, the IBM Intelligent Operations Center for Smarter Cities, which pulls together functionality from more than a dozen IBM products and integrates it into a single package. The software gives cities of any size a holistic view of information across city departments and agencies and a central point of command and collaboration.

This package came together really fast. “We’re laying track as we cross it,” I was told by Michael Kehoe, the IBM product manager in charge of building the Intelligent Operations Center.

To me, one of the coolest aspects of the software is its awareness of the interrelationships between systems—called event correlation. Data from different city services is integrated so, for instance, if the water department records that a particular fire hydrant is out commission, the fire department will be alerted to connect to a different hydrant if they get called to a fire in the area.

Click here to view the embedded video.

IBM’s Michael Kehoe talks about the importance of event correlation in managing cities.

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9 a.m. Keynote Conversation: What Makes an Intelligent City?

Dr. Xavier de Souza Briggs, associate director for General Government Programs, Office of Management and Budget, The White House, points out that the building industry has historically been slow to change. Unlike the auto industry, where there are a relative few players and they can develop and adopt new standards rapidly, the building industry is highly fragmented. His point is that there’s a role for government here in helping to set standards—which is one of the things he does at the White House.

The tech industry provides another model. It’s a healthy combination of market competition, industry standards bodies, and standards bodies such as NIST and ICANN setting standards.

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8:40 a.m. Keynote Conversation: What Makes an Intelligent City?

Richard Stengel, managing editor, TIME:  “In my city, New York, Robert Moses used data to create parts of cities that were inimical to the interests of the communities. What’s different now? A lot of those endeavors destroyed parts of cities.”

He asks, What’s different now?

Anne Altman, general manager, Global Public Sector, IBM, says we have a project at IBM called Cities in Motion. We capture information about where people are and how they’re moving, and when they’re moving. We use cell phones and other sensing devices. “People can see if we want to have green space we can  put it in a place where people can get to it. If we’re building roads, how can we design them so people aren’t just sitting in traffic jams. Having the data means we can improve everything from transportation to leisure activities.”

Judith Rodin, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, says one of the differences now is that a lot of data is transparent. People in communities can see it and get involved in projects. They can use the data to make a case that a major city project isn’t really in the public interest.

The Federal government and New York City, among others, are making large amounts of data available to the public.

John Tolva, the chief technology officer in Chicago, built City Forward, a city data sharing organization and Web tool, when he was at IBM previously. Visit there to see how people in dozens of cities around the world have used data to understand what’s really happening in their cities.

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8:05 a.m. Keynote Conversation: What Makes an Intelligent City?

Rudith Rodin, president of the Rockefeller Foundation: “We’re seeing a tsunami of urbanization”

“Urbanization is an engine for sustainability, but it’s also a gathering place for poverty.”

“We need technology. But we need it to be inclusive. If we don’t answer ‘Intelligent for what?’ and ‘Intelligent for whom?’ then we aren’t going to build the intelligent city of the 21^st century.”

This is an important reminder. Rigging a city up with sensors, wiring and data dashboards won’t make a big difference unless the parties involved first come up with a vision of what they want the city to be and how they want it to work. Another key: involving people from throughout the community in helping to shape this vision.

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8:00 a.m.: Chase Rynd, president and executive director, National Building Museum, tells the crowd of 300: “We’re at the convergence of two major events in history. For the first time in human history more than 50% of the people on the planet are living in cities. But it may be a way to make a more sustainable world. People in cities have a lower carbon footprint. But cities face challenges.”

The National Building Museum has been working for six months to gather information about cities as systems. It has published infographics on its own web site and on Time Magazine’s site–also surveying people about their attitudes and reactions.  So far, more than 5000 people have responded. The info can be found here.

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IBM uses the term smarter cities. It’s an essential piece of the overall Smarter Planet strategy. The company believes that smarter cities drive sustainable economic growth by leveraging information to make better decisions, coordinating resources to operate more effectively and anticipating problems so they can be resolved before they get too big. If cities manage their knowledge wisely and aggressively, they’ll become better places to live and will create abundant economic opportunities for their citizens in a rapidly changing world. IBM’s Smarter Cities business has grown to nearly 2,000 engagements with cities globally in the last two years.

Technorati Tags: IBM, Intelligent Cities

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.

An innovative, high-tech computing system was able to cure traffic gridlock in Stockholm by directly identifying and charging vehicles depending on the time of day — higher during peak times, lower during off peak hours.

And there are many more examples in other cities, including transportation systems instrumented with sensors, meters, cameras, smart phones, and biometric devices that give us the ability to measure, sense and see the exact condition of everything — from the temperature of a train wheel bearing, to metal fatigue on a bridge.

There’s also clever software that can “learn” traveler patterns and behaviors, identify possible dangerous intersections and stretches of road, and make recommendations for people’s commutes.

But as IBM has discovered throughout its long history, when you take on a complex systems like transportation and traffic you need more than just cutting-edge technology to be successful.  You need to analyze how things flow, how people interact, how different processes can be more productive and human, and then bring together the abundance of technologies, skills, and approaches that send us down a smarter route and make true innovation possible.

Click on the image to open the picture story:

Icons at Work: Wandering along the tracks of time

Icons at Work: A Century of Inquiring Minds

Technorati Tags: IBM Centennial, IBM100, sensors, Smarter Cities, Stockholm, traffic, traffic congestion