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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 Elly Keinan
General Manager
IBM Latin America
(Editor’s note: Keinan will be one of the hosts of IBM’s two-day Smarter Cities conference in Rio de Janeiro this week. Follow live blogging from the event on Nov. 9 and Nov. 10.)
A year and a half ago, torrential rains in Rio de Janeiro caused floods and landslides that brought much of the city to a standstill and killed more than 100 residents. Eleven inches of rain beat down in a 24-hour period. In a city with a history of tropical rainstorms and flooding, Brazilians demanded to know why the authorities were not better prepared.
Rio’s mayor, Eduardo Paes, vowed that such a disaster would not happen again. He moved decisively to bolster the city’s defenses against weather-related disruptions. Today, the city has a new state-of-the art intelligent operations center where managers monitor dozen of screens for data concerning weather, traffic, police, medical services, and other city departments on a real-time basis and anticipate looming problems—putting defenses in place to diminish their impact.
The mayor’s actions demonstrate convincingly how bold leaders can harness the power of sophisticated technologies to transform the way a city operates—and make life better for their constituents. The technology underpinning the Rio Operations Center, which was set up by IBM consultants and software architects, has matured since the center went live almost a year ago. Now, this kind of management system is becoming available to cities of all sizes—including via a cloud computing offering, which makes it faster to deploy.
These advances represent an important moment in the evolution of cities.
7:00
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By: Jesús Guzmán, CEO, Invensys Rail Dimetronic
The world is rapidly urbanizing. We estimate that by 2050, two-thirds of the world’s population reside in cities, some as large as 20 million people. This burgeoning population will require innovative, reliable, and safe methods of transportation.
As one of the leading rail signaling companies in Europe, we at Invensys Rail Dimetronic put safety at the top of our list. After all, trains like the Spanish High Speed Lines travel as fast as 350 km per hour, so smart train signaling systems have to be, at a minimum, 99% reliable. Continue Reading »
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by Clay Luthy, Global Distributed Energy Resource Manager for IBM’s Energy & Utilities industry
In a recent IBM survey of automotive executives, 83 percent responded that their future product line would include electric vehicles. Further, there is a lot of talk and interest amongst consumers who are intrigued by the prospect of the reduced emissions, quiet ride, and decreased maintenance costs of electric vehicles. Following the market and seeing these statistics, it is apparent to me that ‘whether’ electric vehicles will become mainstream is no longer in question. Personally, I’m very excited about this prospect – so excited that I’m preparing and even had my garage wired for an electric vehicle charger. Continue Reading »
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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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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 »
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Every tech company attempts to sell potential customers on the promise that its products and services will deliver a superior return on the customer’s investment dollars. That’s not a particularly difficult task when you’re talking about traditional IT investments, which seek to improve the efficiency and productivity of the IT function itself. But it’s harder when the purpose of the investment is to boost the performance of an entire business, including placing a value on the benefits received by the customers’ customers. Such is the challenge facing IBM when it hawks its Smarter Planet solutions.
A year ago, IBM’s leaders commissioned the IBM Center for Applied Insights, an internal research group, to come up with a way of presenting the whole array of gains from Smarter Planet projects by focusing on vertical industries. The group created a new methodology for gathering and analyzing pertinent information and placing dollar values both on the components of a project and on the entire effort. The initiative, called “ROI for Smart,” has resulted in series of reports analyzing the returns for specific projects in eight industries. Steve Rogers, the director of the Center, says that unlike other approaches in the tech industry, “this is not about measuring the ROI of IBM’s products and services; it’s measuring the ROI of pursuing a Smarter Planet path and achieving higher levels of business competency.”
As a reporter covering the enterprise technology industry for two decades, I was deeply skeptical whenever tech vendors claimed that they had come up with their own assessments of the value they could create for customers. I still am. But I’m also impressed with the results that Rogers and his team have come up with.
You can decide for yourself if their analysis is credible by reading the reports:
Healthcare: Capturing Value from Patient Centered Care.
Retail: The Value of Smarter Merchandising.
Electronics: The Road to Customer Intimacy.
Banking: The Value of Credit Risk Management.
Transportation: The Value of Customer Centric Sales & Services.
Government: The Value of Smarter Social Services.
Telecom: Smarter Communications Through Analytics.
Chemicals and Petroleum: The Value of Smarter Oil and Gas Fields.
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This is the third in a series of three essays about the potential payoff from applying Smarter Planet thinking to businesses. The first two essays can be found here and here.
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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This is a guest post from Stephen Tame (@Stephentame), Chief Information Officer, Jetstar Airways
How can an airline make travel more convenient and hassle-free? Technology can play an important part. We book our travel online, start the check-in process for a flight at home, boarding passes can be delivered to our smartphones and use self-serve kiosks at the airport. All of this is designed to give the traveller more control over the airport experience.
As the leading low-fare airline for Australia and Asia Pacific, we are constantly looking for ways to improve the travel experience. And, it makes business sense too. Using self-service technology helps passengers get through the airport and to their flight as quickly and smoothly as possible. This also helps the airline run more efficiently and helps us keep airfare costs down for our travellers. Continue Reading »
