DC Verge and the SustainAble City

Adam Aston must have gone to Verge DC. I did. But I didn't leave the ranch of course - miracle of the virtual that Verge is. Adam's piece, focusing on SustainAbility is worth reading.

Bottom Line:  They are going to come and we better build it:)

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Matt Rogers on the VERGE Opportunity - Internet of Things from Hugh Byrne on Vimeo.

Edwin Lee speaks on the VERGE opportunity (Vehicles to Grid) from Hugh Byrne on Vimeo.

Citystates from SustainAbility on Vimeo.
The Seven States
The report defines seven characteristics that SustainAbility concludes can help cities and business thrive symbiotically. Here’s how co-authors, Chris Guenther and Mohammed Al-Shawaf describe these “citystates” and the opportunities they open to businesses:

1. The Connected City: Growing technological sophistication and traditional social connectivity provide opportunities for greater awareness, trust and collaboration among stakeholders. How can business both bolster and create value from this essential connectivity?

2. The Decisive City: Cities often have the urgency and accountability to act decisively. For example, cities lead state and national efforts in the areas of climate change mitigation and adaptation. How might companies improve their own decisiveness, and/or leverage that of cities, to drive sustainability?

3. The Adaptive City: Cities are among the most adaptable structures in society. How can business grow more adaptive while collaborating with cities on their mutual survival?

4. The Collaborative/Competitive City: The healthy tension between peer-to-peer collaboration and economic and brand competition among cities has potential to drive precompetitive sustainable innovation and rapid diffusion of solutions. How might industries exploit this tension in their own parallel drive for sustainability and competitiveness?

5. The Visceral City: Urban living is shaped by numerous real and potential feedback loops. As urbanization progresses and its impacts become more pressing. How can companies beneficially tap into these feedbacks to drive both value creation and sustainable development?

6. The Personal City. The influence of shared identity and values -- in cities and elsewhere -- is a particularly powerful driver of individual and collective action. How can businesses connect with citizen-consumers’ values to drive demand for more sustainable products and services?

7. The Experimental City: Cities are inherently creative, experimental social systems. This opens up links between R&D and low barriers to entry for nontraditional actors. How can business embrace the growing democratization of innovation and leverage cities as laboratories to test and scale sustainability solutions?

G+ Hangout for New City Design

The Watchful Eye

Cities as platforms for living - the ubiquitous streams of real-time data, overwhelming our analytic capabilities, has the information we need to sustainably manage our living environments. Innovation and granular deployments may be the key to the future.

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  Surveillance Video Becomes a Tool for Studying Customer Behavior
MIT Technology Review

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Software mines security footage to help business owners see what people do once they're inside the store.
The huge success of online shopping and advertising—led by giants like Amazon and Google—is in no small part thanks to software that logs when you visit Web pages and what you click on. Startup Prism Skylabs offers brick-and-mortar businesses the equivalent—counting, logging, and tracking people in a store, coffee shop, or gym with software that works with video from security cameras.
"There's a lot of wonderful information locked up in video, and 40 million security cameras in the U.S. collecting it, but it's data that's not been available," says Steve Russell, cofounder and CEO of Prism, based in San Francisco. "We want to free up that information."
More ...

Helsinki Urban Flows

Urbanflow, a joint effort of Nordkapp and Urbanscale, envisions an operating system for cities. The scenario explored in the video revolves around situated urban screens and their potential uses.

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Urbanflow Helsinki from Nordkapp on Vimeo.

The general challenge is that while cities are fast, municipal decision making is slow by nature. The heavy and invisible decision-making process within cities causes disconnect with citizens, and despite an abundance of commercial messaging platforms, there is yet to be a dedicated platform where the city and its citizens can meet.

ARUP: Cities Missing Smart Opportunity - Information

Ref: An ARUP vision of the future?

07 Dec 2011

Cities are wasting the potential of smart technologies by failing to realize the value of their hidden infrastructure and digital assets, according to a report published today by The Climate Group, Accenture (NYSE: ACN), Arup and Horizon Digital Economy Research at The University of Nottingham.

The report, Information Marketplaces: The new economics of cities, states that while cities are using information and communications technology (ICT) to improve their sustainability and efficiency, they are not recognizing or measuring the full value of smart initiatives and are missing the opportunity to turn unused data and infrastructure into new low carbon solutions and services.
The report argues that the application of smart technology is being hindered because:

• Technology-led experiments often fail to achieve useful outcomes for consumers and residents
• cities currently develop information and communications technology in fragmented projects without a coherent framework
• cities are unsure of the social and financial payback from the investments they are being asked to make.

“Our cities sit on vast untapped resources of data and infrastructure that could be integrated to accelerate the clean revolution while improving the convenience and quality of urban life. To unlock that potential, cities need the right leadership to create a vision of social, environmental and economic goals that can be achieved by a more integrated application of smart technology.”

-Mark Kenber, CEO, The Climate Group.
The report highlights two key steps to maximize the smart technologies in cities:

Articulate the benefits

Cities must capture the potential benefits of smart technology initiatives with a common set of metrics that can be translated into financial and non-financial values of relevance to different stakeholders. These will enable cities to:

• compare the relative benefits of projects and prioritize between them; a smart grid and a road pricing initiative for example;
• achieve economies of scale by identifying how a communications backbone, in this instance, could be used for both applications.

“We need to reframe the intelligent city value proposition by measuring and articulating the full social, environmental and economic rate of return generated by city-wide initiatives. Only then can the private sector make the business case for participating. Only then can cities make the capital decisions that bring greatest value to citizens.”

- Simon Giles, global senior principal, Intelligent Cities, Accenture.

Freely available data

Research carried out by Horizon suggests that cities must provide open and free access to their data and digital assets in the form of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). Making bus passenger data available, for example, could result in a range of real time commuter information services. Opening APIs will reduce the cost to third-party developers of creating new information-based services and applications. It also will maximize competitive innovation by creating a level playing field for innovators.

“An intelligent city not only reduces carbon emissions, but attracts talent and investment through quality services and infrastructure and through convenience that delights residents. Cities must open up their digital assets and create a thriving information marketplace for innovations that achieve these aims. It will take courage for city leaders to challenge the cultural norms of their administrations and expose themselves to this form of dynamic collaboration.”

- Volker Buscher, Director, Arup

“By using the data from their digital infrastructure as a market creation asset, cities will be able to capture significantly more value from smart city ICT investments. In addition, developing new information marketplaces will help cities create new industries and achieve sustainable economic growth.”

- Catherine Mulligan, Transitional Fellow, Horizon Digital Economy Research.
The report makes several recommendations to policy makers and companies

Local and national governments

• Encourage the use of common, international metrics to assess performance and to facilitate investment decisions;
• Establish a capability within the city administration to align political objectives and civil administration with public and private sector project execution;
• Start a debate on open data and on the role cities should play in creating growth opportunities.

Companies

• Understand the investment decision making process of cities to ensure private sector technology development aligns with public sector legal and procurement processes and timescales;
• Encourage pre-procurement task forces, whereby companies can offer their technical expertise to help cities streamline procurement processes;
• Use multi-partner trials to develop capabilities for longer term scaling of technology solutions.

Turn off the Lights!

Don't Forget to Turn Off the Lights!

Light from Sunday Paper on Vimeo.

How cities (and their utilities) are blowing it: New research reveals three failures

By Jesse Berst

New research from an international consortium says the world's cities are failing their citizens by failing to capture the full value of infrastructure and data. Although the report's lessons apply to any kind of smart technology, they are directly relevant to the challenges and consumer pushback faced by many of today's smart grid efforts.

 

“Our cities sit on vast untapped resources of data and infrastructure that could be integrated to accelerate the clean revolution while improving the convenience and quality of urban life,” said Mark Kenber, CEO, The Climate Group, one of the report's co-authors. The value of smart grid and other smart technologies are not being realized because of:

·         Too much "technology push" that does not create useful outcomes for residents

·         A lack of a framework for integrated technology, which results in fragmented and siloed projects

·         A lack of understanding of the social and financial paybacks

 

The report argues that cities (and, by extension, the utilities that serve them) must get better at two things. First, they must learn to fully understand the benefits of smart technology. And fully articulate those benefits to all stakeholders. “We need to reframe the... value proposition by measuring and articulating the full social, environmental and economic... return generated by city-wide initiatives,” said Simon Giles, global senior principal, Intelligent Cities, Accenture. “Only then can the private sector make the business case for participating. Only then can cities make the capital decisions that bring greatest value to citizens.”

Open data a necessity

Second, cities (and, by extension, their utilities) must make their data available to the market so developers can build applications on top. “By using the data from their

digital infrastructure as a market creation asset, cities will be able to capture significantly more value from smart city ICT investments," said Catherine Mulligan, Transitional Fellow, Horizon Digital Economy Research. “In addition, developing new information marketplaces will help cities create new industries and achieve sustainable economic growth.”

 

As global competition intensifies, more and more cities will look to smart technology to pull ahead. This report will make valuable reading for utilities that want an advance look at the new demands and new pressures that will face them in the decades ahead.

 

The report, "Information Marketplaces: The New Economics of Cities" was published in partnership by Accenture, Arup, The Climate Group and Horizon Digital Economy Research.