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by Martin Kelly, IBM Venture Capital Group
When we talk about a Smarter Planet our discussions usually move very quickly from the general to the specific. Take water management as an example. What is a Smart Bay? How does the technology capture weather data in real-time? How will it improve the quality of my drinking water? Can I use the information to plan my fishing trip this weekend? The most interesting conversations are about the detail of how the solution operates.
Most Smarter Planet solutions however involve many different groups. Typically these companies and organizations range in size from large multinationals to smaller niche players and start-ups. Each one however brings a different part of the solution and unique domain knowledge and experience. In this post however I want to talk about these ecosystems and what we are doing to support them.
It’s about communities and entrepreneurs
Over the last couple of years we have been watching as organizations like Seedcamp, TechStars and Y-Combinator have started to build a network of highly active ecosystems. They have successfully helped entrepreneurs build businesses with lots of mentoring and very small amounts of cash. They have successfully engaged the broad community of seasoned veterans to support young entrepreneurs and share experience and networks. They have started to build new role models for entrepreneurs to show how building your own business is an exciting and rewarding career path. Their way of working and geographies are slightly different however they all have great mentor networks and a model which puts the entrepreneur at the centre.
It is interesting for me is to watch how the energy of the entrepreneur is matched with the experience of the mentors who have ‘done it’ before. To see how they learn and evolve very quickly to adsorb new insights and outlooks. Also to see that the gap is not capital (most of the time) but skills, experience and networks. This energy and experience is important if we want to build a Smarter Planet.
Smartcamp grew from our involvement in these programs.
What is SmartCamp
SmartCamp is designed for start-ups who are developing solutions which fit this vision of a Smarter Planet and connecting them with a global network of mentors, entrepreneurs and investors.
The program will be rolled out to 7 cities in 2010. In each location, five companies will be selected to spend one day networking with 25 world-class entrepreneurs, investors and industry experts. Selected companies will be invited to the global finals week to be held in Nov.
SmartCamp aims to accelerate the expansion and internationalization of promising companies. We do this a number of ways. Firstly, selected companies receive 12 week mentoring. During this time we identify appropriate resources IBM has in terms of technology, marketing and go-to-market globally. Secondly, in addition to our own resources we look to leverage our network. For example via our Venture Capital team we work with leading investors to filter and showcase appropriate companies. Last year 4 of the 5 selected SmartCamp companies received funding or investment offers from our partners.
As you might expect these events will be covered by leading local and international press.
What types of start-ups?
SmartCamp is interested in early stage technology companies who are helping to build a Smarter Planet including:
•Networking and Mobility
•Enterprise Software Applications
•Internet & SAAS
•Cloud and IT infrastructure
•Healthcare & IT related
•Analytics and Modelling
•Energy efficiency and Smart buildings
•Carbon and Water management
•Transportation systems
•Smart Cities including – transportation, education, and public safety
•Risk management
Presenting companies will at the seed or start-up stage. In all cases the process is open to companies with revenues
less than $1m in the last 12 months.
Next Steps – Apply today
Smartcamp is now open – the first event is Stockholm on the 20th May. The other locations and dates are:
Additional locations include:
Stockholm 20th May
Boston 3rd June
Tel Aviv 24th June
London: 21st July
Silicon Valley: 8th Sept
Paris: 16th Sept
Dublin: 15th Nov
Note: deadline is typically 14 days before the event
And finally….
In future posts we’ll ask our partners like Seedcamp and Techstars to talk about their experiences of building these networks. We’ll also ask the selected companies from 2009 to post on what they are doing and what SmartCamp means for them.
Twitter Helps My “Smart Home” Reduce Energy Usage and Trim Electricity Bills by One-Third
by Andy Stanford-Clark
The science of how things work has fascinated me for as long as I can remember. As a young lad, I developed a way for my Mum to dry her washing outside without it getting wet when it rained. I set up a simple buzzer that would go off when a sensor detected falling rain. When Mum heard the signal, it was time to grab the laundry off the line.
Today I’m still trying to “connect the dots” of how my family and I can pursue a lifestyle that reduces our use of natural resources.
Using the same “messaging” software I work on with my development team at IBM’s software lab in Hursley, UK, I’ve made my 16th Century cottage on the Isle of Wight into a modern-day “smart home,” so I know exactly how much electricity and water I’m using, and when I’m using them.
While some might scoff at this, having this knowledge has enabled my family to reduce our personal carbon footprint and slash energy bills by one-third.
Here’s how it works: About a dozen wireless sensors are hooked up to the electricity and water systems and other things in the house. The sensors collect information, which is fed into an analytics system that makes “intelligent” decisions based upon that information. The updates are distributed to a display in my house, and as a stream of messages on Twitter, the social networking communications tool, which I can watch on the web, or on my mobile.
The “tweets,” or brief status messages, talk about how much electricity or water is being used, or even if a mouse has been caught in a trap in the attic. I can see unusual activity: if I’ve left on a heater, my home “talks to me,” via Twitter, and I can go find what’s causing the spike in electricity use.
The information on display has become part of the home’s ambient background, like having a light on in the kitchen. You know it’s there: but unless the light starts flickering, you don’t pay much attention to it. Unless my home “tweets” me that something unusual is happening, such as a window left open on a cold day, the messages blend into the household’s background.
Feeling good about helping the environment can be contagious. What if all of us got involved? According to the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change, 47 percent of the country’s carbon emissions come from the way the nation generates heat. The DECC has set a goal of having “smart meters” in all homes in the UK by 2020 to monitor gas and electricity usage.
If you don’t want to wait until 2020, you don’t need a Ph.D. to install and use the relatively inexpensive gadgets available to monitor your energy use and to begin conserving energy immediately.
Sometimes what we do for ourselves can benefit many others.
Like many commuters, I want to spend the least amount of time on my commute.
Strong winds or fog can delay the ferries running between my home on the Isle of Wight and my workplace near Winchester.
By tapping into data available online about the location of the Red Jet ferries, I began timing my arrival at the dock to when a ferry would actually leave. I began sharing this information via Twitter to other passengers. To its credit, the Red Funnel line saw the value in this information, and now the company provides a constant stream of information about the ferry schedule to their passengers who follow the company on Twitter. This is not ferry personnel posting the information to Twitter manually, it’s a tweetject (an object that twitters!). That’s a tricky idea for some people, but it’s at the core of building a smarter planet.
These are examples of how all of us have the ability to make our entire planet “smarter.” We just need to use sensors that operate individually to instrument the world around us, link together the information streams the sensors provide in a network, and then apply intelligence in the form of an analytics system that can recommend appropriate actions.
I look at my “smart home” and use of social networking tools for commuting as steps that I can take as an individual.
If enough of us take steps at the micro level, momentum will build. Smarter buidlings are coming as we think about structures differently: seeing homes not just as living spaces, but as living systems; seeing offices not just as static structures where work is done, but as manifestations of all the ways the world works.
Click to listen to podcast: Building a Smarter Planet – Patents
Manny Schecter, IBM Chief Patent Counsel told me that “patents are the currency of innovation.”
Approximately 150,000 U.S. patents are granted to investors each year and for the last 17 years, IBM has received more U.S. patents than any other company in the world. According to IFI Patent Intelligence, in 2009 IBM was issued 4,914 U.S. patents. So IBM is clearly a major player in the world of innovation.
Yet it’s still the case that some don’t know what IBM does. It’s clear based on numbers that IBM is an “innovative” company, sure, but what does IBM invent and why?
What I found out from speaking with Kathryn Guarini and John Gunnels, two IBMers with a number of IBM patents is that, believe it or not, inventors don’t want to spend their time reinventing the wheel to pad their portfolio, they’re looking toward innovation that matters (a company line which I understand better now that I’ve spoken with some true innovators). Guarini, director of Systems and Technology Development for IBM Systems and Technology Group says, “We want to innovate where there is real value. We don’t want to innovate everywhere, all the time.”
Mr. Gunnels is a research scientist in the area of high performance computing. He has worked on several projects and is named on multiple patents related to IBM’s Blue Gene Supercomputer which was awarded the U.S. National Medal of Technology and Innovation in 2009. Blue Gene systems have helped map the human genome, investigate medical therapies, safeguard nuclear arsenals, simulate radioactive decay, simulate brain power, envision financial scenarios, predict weather and climate trends, and identify fossil fuels. And he told me that there have actually been cases where Blue Gene predicts the outcome of an experiment, which were only later verified with an actual experiment.
Several patents have been issued around Blue Gene in 2009, but consider another patent which IBM was issued this year:
U.S. Patent 7,612,655 – “Alarm System for Hearing Impaired Individuals Having Hearing Assistive Implanted Devices”
This patent describes a method for alerting profoundly deaf sleepers to danger, such as fire and carbon monoxide, or to circumstances such as a doorbell, phone call or wakeup alarm. The concept works best for deaf individuals who have cochlear implants. These people typically deactivate their implants when they bathe or sleep for reasons of comfort and safety. They do so by detaching a small device normally worn outside the ear, and which normally functions as a signal transmitter to an implanted component. During sleep or bathing activities, they typically can’t or won’t wear a device that vibrates, nor can they rely on flashing lights to catch their attention. The patented method enables the implanted component to begin buzzing abnormally or stay silent, depending on what occasion for which the user has programmed it to respond.
As an IBMer, it’s a source of job-related pride to see companies like mine investing in something that actually makes a difference for our company and for the world. “Innovation that matters”, not just a catchy slogan or corporate mantra. It is one of our company values. Something we, as IBMers, take pride in and use as inspiration everyday. And I think that the real thing to take away from all the reports on patents and patent leadership is this: a great number of these innovations being patented are helping to make the world safer, cleaner, more efficient and most notably, smarter; for people, societies, and for the world.
To read about more IBM innovations and their impact, see this article from IBM Research.
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Jack Mason in
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Jack Mason in
The companion to this blog, our Smarter Planet site on Tumblr, is what feeds the "Related Discussions Across the Internet" links in the left hand navigation.
As Tumblr aptly describes its platform, if a blog is more like a journal or longer-form discussion format, a "tumblelog" is more like a scrapbook. Posts are brief, multimedia and in our case, cover the waterfront of news, developments, sites, insights and examples of how a smarter planet is emerging. Our goal is to give people a broad feel for what smarter planet means, and how widely it is taking shape.
And now we've i
mplemented a version of the site optimized for mobile devices. So be sure to add http://smarterplanet.tumblr.com/mobile to your iPhone, Blackberry or other device bookmarks.
Of course, this mobile iteration isn't just a convenience for the rapidly growing ranks of mobile internet users. The explosion of web-enabled smartphones and other handheld devices loaded with sensors such as cameras, microphones and GPS chips is one of the most salient signs of the "internet of things" and "ubiquitous computing" that is central to what Smarter Planet is all about.
Jack Mason
IBM Global Business Services, Strategic Programs & Social Media Innovation
20:46
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Jack Mason in
My colleague Adam Christensen wants to make Smarter Planet something that matters to each of us: something that more people can understand, appreciate and maybe even feel some degree of personal, emotional connection to.
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Jack Mason in
As we expand our social media outreach for Smarter Planet, we will begin to feature and point to other bloggers who are thinking and investigating issues related to intelligent infrastructure. (Please feel free to recommend, via comments here, blogs and sites that we should connect with.)
Here’s one example from the Healthnex blog, on wearable healthcare devices and a home monitering system developed by Intel.
You can also sift through several years of Healthnex posts on topics related to smarter planet such as "e-health trends," healthcare IT innovations, clinical decision support systems and genomics.
Jack Mason
IBM Global Business Services
jkmason@us.ibm.com
http://smarterplanet.tumblr.com
