Cities are the future of global civilization and the economy, and smart cities are the only way they’ll survive and prosper!
Join me and two SAP experts on the subject, Dina Dayal (global vice president for Digital Enterprise Platform Group) and Saj Kumar (vice president of Digital Transformation and Internet of Things) as we guest on Bonnie D. Graham’s always-enjoyable Coffee Break With Game Changers, 11 AM EDT, 8 AM PDT (it will be archived at the site if you can’t listen live.
Bonnie likes us to start with a provocative (and relevant) quote, and mine will be from Jane Jacobs’ great Death and Life of American Cities:
“Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because,
and only when, they are created by everybody.”
… with the emphasis on everybody: I’ll explain that there really is an important role in smart cities for city government, the private sector, and — often ignored — grassroots innovators.
A critical key is the global Things Network, created by Wienke Gieseman and his Gang of Ten in Amsterdam, who created a free LoRaWAN city-wide data network for $12,000 and in less than a month, and then went on to create a global network and a crowdsourced campaign to bring the cost of LoRaWAN hubs down to $200.
I like to think I was there at the beginning, working with Vivek Kundra, then the DC’s CTO (before his accomplishments there led Obama to name him the first US CIO). Vivek and Mayor Fenty took the bold move of releasing more than 40 major city data bases on a real-time basis, then held a contest to get smart developers to create new-fangled “apps” (remember, this was 2008!) to capitalize on them. Because the apps were open-source, they’ve been constantly copied and improved in the years since then.
And that’s only the beginning:
- creative startups such as Alicia Asin’s Libelium, working with an enlightened city government, have made Barcelona a massive testlab for the Iot, and arguably THE smart city of the day
- Columbus OH won the Obama Administration’s Smart City competition for its all-inclusive transportation scheme (and I do mean all-inclusive: who ever thought a better transportation network could be used to cut infant mortality???)
- Smart Cities organizations have been formed in cities worldwide to share ideas — we’re all in this together!
And, of course, I’m going to bring the discussion down to earth by really getting down and dirty — yessiree, we’re gonna talk trash cans.
Be there or be square!
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