Smart City

Smart City

Wednesday, November 30, 2016

Smart Solutions for Smart Cities


NB-IOT: A SUSTAINABLE TECHNOLOGY FOR CONNECTING BILLIONS OF DEVICES

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Source: Ericsson Technology Review

Why Smart Cities Must Be Smart Enough to Evolve Over Time

“Smart city” has become a buzzword in recent years as cities across the globe have started to integrate smart technologies with their infrastructure and policy decisions. But what exactly is a smart city? The term is nebulous at best, and different cities vary widely not only in the specific technologies and implementations they embrace, but in their very approach to the concept and what it means for their citizens.
In the broadest of terms, a smart city uses technology to improve quality of life by increasing the efficiency of municipal services and meeting the needs of residents. For instance, sensors allow city services to react to real situations in real time by dimming streetlights on unused streets, monitoring water pipes for leaks, or changing traffic lights along the route of emergency vehicles. The benefits of innovations like these are easy to quantify in terms of saved energy, saved money, even saved lives.
Applications aimed at the vaguer goal of improving quality of life include projects like minute-to-minute reports on air pollution for citizens with asthma, or using historical data to predict crime and direct police to where they are most likely to be needed. The market for smart cities has massive expansive potential — up to $1.5 trillion worldwide by one estimate.
Smart technology allows the workings of a city itself to adapt in real time to the reality its citizens are facing immediately, and to adjust as that reality changes. That means, however, that the true test of just how smart a smart city is will be whether it is able to evolve to keep pace as its citizen’s needs evolve.
Responsive change is unavoidable and desirable when dealing with cutting edge technologies like these. Already in its short lifespan, the smart city has seen three distinct generations. When the concept was first born, smart technologies were created and pushed by tech companies themselves, and cities were jumping on board without a proper understanding of how to implement the new technologies they were buying, nor the concrete implications for citizens. Urban strategist Boyd Cohen, who has been studying smart cities since 2011, calls this era Smart Cities 1.0.
In the Smart Cities 2.0 phase, smart technology projects are driven by city administrators themselves. These government-designed projects are typically geared towards improving quality of life and allow for grand, sweeping visions for the future of their cities.
Perhaps one of the most impressive examples of this can be found in Rio de Janeiro, where the mayor joined forces with IBM to create a sensor system that mitigated landslide damage to favelas in the surrounding hills. That project has since ballooned into a large-scale operations center which IBM is confident will have an impressive 80% success rate at predicting dangerous floods and downpours 48 hours before they occur, allowing the city to be prepared and save lives with a critical early warning and evacuation plan. Furthermore, the system has the crucial capacity to become even smarter in the future by detecting crime via video streaming and integrating emergency services.
That brings us to the final phase — so far. Smart Cities 3.0 takes the infinite adaptability of such technologies to an unprecedented level. Cities that have embraced this phase of development rely on citizens to be active not only as consumers but as co-creators of projects. Vancouver, for instance, engaged more than 30,000 citizens in the development of their Greenest City 2020 Action Plan, and Vienna relied on citizens to participate as investors in local solar plants in order to meet their renewable energy goals. Barcelona solicited new smart projects directly from residents by launching contests for citizen innovators.
These phases are not teleological, and the sometimes chaotic democracy of Smart Cities 3.0 is not necessarily an end goal. The real advantage of a smart city is that the best designs will be able to respond to needs we haven’t even considered yet. We may begin to see Smart Cities branching further out from solely practical considerations into other need fulfillment, such as fun projects designed to make the city an attractive and exciting place to live and visit. Take, for instance, this UK public art installation which used infrared cameras to record the shadows of pedestrians and project them back at another time using the streetlights.
It seems likely that the future lies with an advantageous combination of 2.0 municipal planning and vision with 3.0 methods of engagement so that the city can learn from its own members on the ground, who are likely to experience unmet needs before a mayor. Administrators are still necessary to guide and support growth, but cities also need to tap into the creative capacity of citizens as participants. The changes we will require are, by their very nature, impossible to predict, and so it is crucial that smart cities are designed to reevaluate and evolve as needed. After all, the smartest cities will always be the ones with the smarts to change with the times.
 By Ronald Chagoury Jr. - Eko Atlantic.

Thursday, November 24, 2016

IBM sets up IoT consulting service

IBM has announced an array of services, industry offerings and capabilities to help enterprise clients, start-ups and developers drive digital transformation with the IoT.
 
With the number of connected devices skyrocketing, IBM says it is making IoT accessible to millions around the world. The company is dedicating more than 1500 industry experts with its Watson IoT consulting service, as well as giving open and free access to its Watson IoT platform.
 
Today’s announcement follows Forrester Research naming IBM a leader in its Wave report on IoT software platforms. Forrester analysed and scored 11 IoT software platform vendors, identifying IBM as a leader, citing: “The Watson IoT Platform can serve a broad range of advanced IoT use cases.”
 
The report also noted that “IBM has added significant capabilities to the platform, including augmented reality, cognitive capabilities, blockchain, edge analytics, analytics tooling and natural language processing, to name a few. With a strong commitment to open source standards and a robust global partner ecosystem, IBM is well positioned for market leadership.”
 
To help clients across industries capture the massive business opportunity of the digitisation of the physical world, IBM is launching the global IBM Watson IoT consulting practice. The practice will feature 1500 experts across IBM Watson IoT headquarters in Munich, Germany (pictured), and in eight other IBM IoT centres across Asia, Europe and the Americas.
 
“The internet of things is making an enormous impact on our lives and helping to spur even deeper levels of innovation for those developing the connected devices and products of our future,” said Harriet Green, general manager at IBM Watson IoT. “IBM is helping knock down the barriers to getting started with IoT, making it accessible for clients as they begin their digital transformation.”
 
By integrating IBM Watson IoT platform APIs and technologies, including cognitive, analytics, mobile, security and cloud capabilities, with development and implementation consulting and ongoing support, clients can fully use the IoT without the risk and complexity of dealing with multiple vendors.
 
"Clients can now easily introduce IoT innovation into their business by leveraging IBM’s industry and technical expertise to deliver lower risk, as-a-service commercial models,” said Jesus Mantas, general manager for business consulting at IBM. “We are very proud our integrated IoT solutions deliver innovation in an easy to consume model for business leaders. We are helping clients accelerate the digitisation of their business processes by making it easy to deploy IoT services globally into their business.”
 
The consulting practice will employ a global network of skilled consultants, data scientists and design and security experts with deep domain and industry expertise, all dedicated to providing clients with guidance on tackling industry specific IoT adoption challenges. The first priority industries include automotive, electronics, industrial products, insurance, retail, telecommunications, transportation and buildings.
 
Clients can apply Watson cognitive computing capabilities, including machine learning and natural language to tap into massive amounts of unstructured data – such as videos and sounds – to gain insights and augment decision making.
 
Technology company Ricoh is one of the first global organisations to work with the new IBM IoT consultants to redesign its engagement model and help its clients embrace intelligent workplace services designed to improve office collaboration and innovation.
 
“Ricoh is helping customers meet the needs of constantly changing workstyles in the new world of work, where information is at the heart of every successful business decision,” said Mona Abutaleb, CEO of Mindshift Technologies, a Ricoh company. “We are teaming with IBM and combining our knowledge and expertise to deliver Ricoh's Workstyle Innovation Technology, which helps our clients collaborate and share information more easily and efficiently."
 
In addition to the consulting practice, IBM is also announcing industry offerings available via its Watson IoT platform, including IoT for manufacturing and asset health insight, designed to help clients address industry-specific IoT adoption challenges and opportunities. Manufacturing is one of the largest opportunities in IoT, with McKinsey estimating IoT applications in factory settings to have the potential to create value of $1.2 to $3.7tn per year in 2025.
 
Now, using IBM Watson IoT for manufacturing, businesses will be able to manage factory equipment and assets, improve manufacturing processes and manage production resources more effectively. For example, the capabilities include intelligent assets and equipment to sense, communicate and self-diagnose issues to improve machinery performance and reduce downtime.
 
Using asset health insights with IBM prescriptive maintenance, organisations can maintain assets based on current asset condition using analytics and data around weather, asset performance and maintenance. Additional industry offerings on the IBM Watson IoT platform cover automotive, electronics and insurance.
 
IBM is also bringing together its application lifecycle management offering with Aras’ product lifecycle management platform to help engineers integrate the complex hardware and software development processes necessary to make the smart, connected products of the future.
 
IBM is already working with more than 50,000 developers around the globe to help them to get up and running on the Watson IoT platform. Just seven months ago, IBM teamed up with Coursera, the education platform that partners with global universities and organisations to offer online courses, to create and launch a developer's guide to the IoT, a course that already has more than 22,000 registrants.
 
The Watson security-rich, scalable and open platform lets developers connect, build, launch and manage IoT applications and services. To help make creating and developing IoT applications more accessible than ever before, IBM will offer free access to the platform.
 
For businesses who are just starting out on IoT and developers testing out and exploring new IoT innovations, IBM offers open and free access to the platform’s development capabilities. As projects grow, developers can then take their prototypes and scale to full production to meet business needs.
 
To help the new wave of technical innovators learn how to develop IoT applications, IBM continues to offer learning classes, via its collaboration with Coursera, and via easily consumable IoT learning tutorials on IBM’s open Watson IoT academy. These tutorials, led by IBM subject matter experts, include an introduction to programming a Raspberry Pi, how to use natural language processing, and how to use Node-Red, the open source visual programming tool set that is becoming a standard for building connected IoT programmes.

Source: M2M Zone Newsdesk

Wednesday, November 23, 2016

Global internet access growing, but usage only at 47% - ITU

Almost all the world can now access the internet, but more work needs to be done to ensure everyone realises the potential of internet use, according to a report from the ITU. The UN agency's annual 'Measuring the Information Society' report found that mobile broadband networks (3G and 4G) now cover 84 percent of the world's population, yet only 47.1 percent of people use the internet. In developing economies where recent household data is available, close to 20 percent of the population, on average, are still not using mobile phones. Most often these are people below the age of 15 or over 74 years old. Among the 15-74 age group, 85 percent or more of the population owns or uses a mobile phone in the countries where data are available.
In addition to education, the level of income is an important criteria in determining whether someone uses the internet or a mobile phone. The ITU report found that for the first time, average mobile prices fell to less than 5 percent of gross national income per capita in 2015. This is based on the price of a basic mobile basket of 100 SMS and 30 calls per month. The price drop is linked to the increasing availability of prepaid packages that bundle SMS and local calls, the ITU said. Prices are lowest in Asia, led by Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.
Nevertheless, it is the cost of the handset more than the services that is the main barrier to owning a mobile phone. Another important barrier is the lack of perceived benefits. In communities where overall mobile uptake is low, mobile phone use is perceived to have fewer benefits since fewer community members are using this mode of communication. Other barriers include lack of ICT skills necessary for accessing the internet through a mobile phone.  Fixed broadband is still much too expensive for many people in developing countries, at around USD 25 per month in 2015 or 14 percent of average GNI per capita. In the least developed countries, a fixed-broadband plan with a minimum of 1GB of data per month still corresponds to over 60 percent of GNI per capita. In comparsion mobile broadband cost an average USD 18 per month, after adjusting for purchasing power. While mobile-broadband services are offered only in 38 percent of the LDCs, in places where it is available the average cost of handset-based services has more than halved in the period 2012-2015 and now accounts for just 11 percent of GNI per capita.

Source:Telecom paper

Tuesday, November 8, 2016

All-in-one connected car solution.

Today, T-Mobile unveiled T-Mobile SyncUP DRIVE™, the Un-carrier’s exclusive, all-in-one connected car solution that easily transforms your car into a rolling Wi-Fi hotspot and gives you extensive added vehicle diagnostics, safety and security features. And, even better, starting November 18, you can get T-Mobile SyncUp DRIVE – normally a $149.99 value – for FREE after 24-month no-cost finance agreement with a 2GB or higher mobile Internet plan.
 
“With T-Mobile SyncUP DRIVE, you have a new way to ride on America’s fastest nationwide 4G LTE network,” said John Legere, president and CEO of T-Mobile. “We’re making it radically simple for customers to connect their cars with a complete, all-in-one package – and the best part is that we’re making it totally free at launch.”
 
Getting going with T-Mobile SyncUP DRIVE couldn’t be easier. It plugs in to your car’s OBD-II (on-board diagnostics) port – standard on most cars built after 1996, is always on, doesn’t require charging and can be managed right from your smartphone.
 
Not only can T-Mobile SyncUP DRIVE cost at least 20% less than the carriers’ solutions over two years, it also does a lot more. T-Mobile SyncUP DRIVE is the only complete 4G LTE connected car solution by a wireless provider. For example, HUM by Verizon runs on ancient 2G technology that Verizon will phase out, and HUM doesn’t even include in-vehicle Wi-Fi connectivity. In fact, you’d need multiple carrier solutions – and multiple carrier rate plans – to duplicate what T-Mobile SyncUP DRIVE does out of the box on T-Mobile’s 4G LTE network. 
 
T-Mobile SyncUP DRIVE enables you to:
  • Stay connected: Deliver an in-vehicle Wi-Fi hot spot on the nation’s fastest 4G LTE network, perfect for sharing data with five Wi-Fi capable devices to entertain your family during those road trips.
  • Drive smarter: Analyze driving behavior to help you drive more safely, while minimizing wear-and-tear, by keeping track of dangerous driving behavior like speeding, harsh braking and rapid accelerations; or, to help you save money on fuel. And, companies can make tracking and expensing business miles a breeze.
  • Keep an eye on your family: Know the location and status of multiple cars without contacting the drivers, set speeding alerts to encourage safe driving behavior and set alerts to be notified when your car enters or leaves a certain area.
  • Locate your car: Keep tabs on your vehicle, from finding your parked car on a map, locating and tracking your car’s real-time driving location or delivering a notification if the device or your car has been tampered with, bumped or had the device removed.
  • Take care of your car: Have a virtual mechanic to help you take better care of your car and help reduce repair costs by providing helpful maintenance reminders and instant notifications about car trouble.
 
T-Mobile works with best-in-class partners to develop and deliver IoT (Internet of Things) solutions, and T-Mobile SyncUP DRIVE is no different. SyncUp DRIVE was developed by T-Mobile together with two key partners – ZTE, a global provider of mobile devices and telecommunication systems, and Mojio, the leading open platform for the growing ecosystem of connected car apps and services.

Source: T- Mobile

Thursday, November 3, 2016

Top 25 IoT Companies by Sales

Creating a list of the top IoT companies can be challenging. Apple has a reputation for being a leading IoT company among consumers, despite having tepid traction for its HomeKit and HealthKit platforms. Meanwhile, Google is working on an array of IoT projects while Microsoft has focused on Windows IoT Core and Azure. It is also difficult, however, to find concrete information that shows how much IoT-related sales each of the companies on this list has. A company's overall buying power, however, is one deciding factor because developing IoT technologies and platforms demands a substantial investment. 
Rank by Market Cap
Company Name (Exchange: Ticker)
Description of IoT Business
1
Apple (AAPL)
HomeKit smart home and HealthKit health tracking platforms
2
Google (GOOG)
Self-driving cars, home automation, IoT beacons, work on IoT standards, IoT cloud
3
Microsoft (MSFT)
Windows 10 IoT Core operating system, Azure IoT
4
Amazon (AMZN)
AWS IoT cloud, Amazon Echo home automation device, Amazon dash buttons
5
GE (GE)
Predix IoT, an industrial cloud-based platform; connected industrial machines
6
AT&T (T)
IoT starter kit, connected car business models
7
Verizon (VZ)
ThingSpace cloud platform, LTE modems for IoT developers.
8
Samsung
ARTIK platform, smart home, and digital health devices
9
Intel (INTC)
IoT hardware for various applications
10
Oracle (ORCL)
IoT cloud service platform
11
Cisco (CSCO) *
Cloud-based IoT software platform, connectivity hardware, IoT-related services and consulting.
12
IBM (IBM)
IBM Watson IoT, cloud services
13
SAP (SAP)
SAP HANA Cloud Platform for the IoT
14
Qualcomm (QCOM)
IoT development platform, chips, security services. Acquisition of connected assets from NXP.
15
Siemens (SIE)
IoT industrial platforms, IoT security services, connected industrial machines.
16
Honeywell/Tridium (HON)
IoT technology for industrial applications, smart buildings, and wearables.
17
Texas Instruments (TXN)
IoT hardware and sensor platforms.
18
Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM)
IoT cloud
19
Johnson Controls (JCI)
Smart building technology. Company merged with Tyco, which has its own IoT platform.
20
Schneider Electric (EPA: SU)
Connected field devices.
21
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE)
Edge computing technology, acquisition of Aruba Networks
22
Tesla (TSLA)
Self-driving vehicle technology
23
Ericsson (ERIC)
IoT accelerator
24
Autodesk (ADSK)
Enterprise IoT software platform
25
Rockwell Automation (ROK)
Industrial IoT applications

Source:Internet of Things Institude

The future of IoT