Smart Cities & The Internet of Things (IoT)

Ljubljana’s successful fight against traffic is one reason the European Commission named the city European Green Capital for 2016. That’s a title that has frequently gone to acknowledged leaders of the debate on urban sustainability, wealthy cities such as Copenhagen, Stockholm or Hamburg. The choice of Slovenia’s small capital shows that cities of modest size and means have lessons to offer, too. Smaller cities can make a staggering amount of change happen in a short period of time. 

ingapore is officially home to the largest number of award-winning smart city projects in APAC, with China a close second, according to IDC. Asian nations certainly have a more pressing need than many to improve the quality of services, reduce costs and boost sustainability in their urban centres. But are competitions like this a genuinely good indicator of how innovative governments are being around the world? And if so, where are the opportunities for investment from western technology players?

Frank Cutitta names some of the most active smart cities today, ones that figure in Smart & Resilient Cities magazine news section because of the breadth and depth of their initiatives. These are Barcelona, Dubai, Seoul, Boston, Bogota, Medellin, Pittsburgh, Kansas City, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Bristol (UK), Copenhagen, Amsterdam, New York City, Sydney, Buenos Aires, and Tokyo.

In the Meeting of the Minds - CityMinded.org blog, Alicia Asin of Libelium delivers her view on the second wave of Smart Cities. If the earliest connected cities served as technology testbeds, in the second wave mayors and city managers are taking into account what the users need, for the long haul.

Joel Makower interviews Mark Paris in a runup to the VERGE City Summit Conference, talking together on the theme of partnerships and financing for what we call Smart Cities (green, sustainable, smart, resilient). We keep talking about the technology, and the risks: what about the money? 

His take: Public-private partnerships and revenue-sharing models can help to defray risk to cities, as long as cities can come to terms with how much revenue/benefit they are willing to relinquish in exchange for risk reduction. 

This is an interesting conversation.

MCQN published a list with links to bios of the talented women who are building and shaping the Internet of Things, all over the world -- in response to the awkward ads put out by marketing team of the Smart IoT London 2016 conference. Vive la difference...

Navigant Research's report released this month covers five key industry sectors as they relate to smart cities: energy, water, transportation, government. Ryan Citron said that as the benefits of smart cities become clearer, the number of supporting projects and partnerships is “rapidly increasing”.

Modern farming methods based on wireless sensor technology can boost productivity, create economies of scale, and help communities thrive. Singapore-based IoT solution provider BioMachines designed a wireless sensor network system integrating Libelium's Waspmote Smart Agriculture sensors to measure environmental parameters in the cocoa fields of tropical Indonesia. The solution collects environmental data from laboratory and field-based experiments, and facilitates knowledge transfer to cocoa farmers.

With its futuristic panorama, Dubai is already a sensor-equipped Smart City, and hosted Cisco's IoT World Forum this week...

Ruthbea Yesner Clarke of IDC is well positioned to point out the near-future thinking on the smart cities concept and where it will grow in the year to come. She cites the following:

1) Adoption and awareness by an expanding set of government leaders, with many large cities setting technical and business guidelines and prioritizing funding for smart city initiatives;

2) Variability in cities' understanding the impact of the IoT, with the advent of new types of mobile devices and connected objects and public/private use of drones, sensors, wearables, connected cars -- a lack in citywide strategy, and an increased need for a strategic framework to speed adoption.

3) Challenge of integrating loads of unstructured data, and the impact of information from social media, "sharing economy" companies and crowdsourcing -- struggle to make sense of all the data points.

We are living in "stirring times..."

We were very impressed with the Water Challenge finalists who presented their systems, products, and technology recently at Singularity University. These were all truly "smart" solutions -- sustainable, resilient, and some were ingenious, inventive uses of materials that were rather low-tech.

With California gasping for water in an historic drought, Tatiana Estevez Carlucci's Permalution fog harvesting device caught our attention. Imagine, pulling down the distilled water from the Pacific fog bank... I can't wait to see the pilot projects she is setting up on the San Francisco Bay.