December 2009
47 posts
How Do we Make Tel Aviv-Yaffo Smarter?
Tel Aviv is in the center of a Mega Polis similar to London, Surrounded by Smaller cities. Traffic Jams, Expensive Housing and Municipality Problems.
An Improved Portal (At present Sharepoint) a more Open Advanced IT.
We can Consolidate, Upgrade and improve services like Nyc.gov, For the whole Central area not only Tel Aviv.
Sam of Chanasys.
Repost From Old Blog: Smart Homes
In the future people will live in smart homes… We’ve been hearing this forever… But the time has come.
First things first, not all my posts will begin with “smart” by coincidence it just so happens I’m thinkin’ about “smart” stuff.
Anyways… Smart Houses are coming, their rise has already begun, consider home servers, lighting systems controlled by people’s iPhones, etc. The real, everyday smart home will work like this…
Scenario: Average weekday morning. Setting: Smart Apartment…
- A seemingly normal alarm clock awakens you, but said alarm clock has a motion sensor. The sensor makes sure you are awake for real, not just reaching to hit the snooze button.
- The clock confirms you “awakeness” and sends a signal to the smart apt.’s core (A small, linux based computer in your closet).
- The signal triggers various scripts on the core cpu, these scripts turn on your shower, begin making your coffee, and queue up a collection of preselected podcasts [their audio follows you throughout the apt’s speaker system] (They could also turn on the TV or radio).
- You take your shower, get dressed.
- Your coffee is waiting.
- You leave, the smart apt turns off all the lights and appliances (except the fridge) and locks down the security system.
I chose a smart apartment for my example because the first instances of the technology would probably be in smaller dwellings. Smart home tech could be implemented easier than you think, too. Barring the speaker network and the programmable shower you wouldn’t have to rip out any walls to set up your smart home. The Linux computer core in your closet would have a web connection and would also be a full fledged server, it would have (assuming the OS wars are still going) clients for both Mac and PC that would allow you to set up the scripts or select from a collection of basic tasks. The core would connect to your home’s power system and use standard wall outlets to command the devices gathered in your abode. All smart home compatible devices would use an industry standard system to send and receive commands. Standard wall outlets have been used for internet connections and could definitely handle simple commands.
In short, A geek with a medium budget could build his own smart home, go forth geeks, let’s see google house before decade’s end!
Treviso come San Francisco
Streetline is starting to gain speed, thanks to a successful trial of their smart-parking system in San Francisco. Basically, it’s a network of parking sensors, which are keyed into a centralized system that monitors open parking spaces. Using a smartphone, you can then find out where the open parking-spaces are. (Smarter Cities)
Anche noi abbiamo i parcheggi intelligenti, solo che non li usiamo per trovare i posti liberi, ma per mettere le multe senza che i vigili debbano alzarsi dalla scrivania.
“If you live in a city of reasonable size, there are probably developers who have already built mobile applications that make it easy and fun to interact with information about the place where you live. But how do you find them?”
—
Just launched this week, Appify.com, a marketplace, discovery platform and innovation engine for local mobile apps. I’m excited to be working on something I believe people will find useful, and that will help make cities a bit smarter, and our lives a bit easier.
For now, it’s fun to get feedback and suggestions from friends and colleagues, and read supportive articles like Appify: A City-by-City App Store. Join us in January when we launch our more public site.
(via dannyshapiro)
LineGuidePod/PemmPOD - Automated Line Following Concept
This is a concept car for a smart city.
The mobile is a solar/electric hybrid of a PC, Media Station, Office Work Station and a Personal Emotional Mobile
“
TOPP is a technology-driven social enterprise. Our projects leverage the Web to create a more open, engaged society.
We develop open source software, media products, and other projects that help people to come together to solve big problems.
In New York, for example, we helped change the city’s approach to transportation planning. We did this by bringing together community stakeholders in the New York City Streets Renaissance, and by developing political mobilizers like Streetfilms.org and Streetsblog.org. This work brought average people into the planning process like never before, and it succeeded in re-orienting city planning toward walkable, bikeable streets.
” —The Open Planning ProjectObama's 25 Ways To Rebuild America: Self-Sufficient Buildings
Obama’s Challenge: Construct green buildings that produce all the energy they consume.
Who’s Got a Shot: Look for companies such as United Technologies and Honeywell to develop industrial-specification, energy-efficient systems for heating, ventilation, and water. Some of the $2.8 billion in Obama’s stimulus plan earmarked for residential green investments could help revive the battered housing and manufacturing markets, too.
Sustainable South Bronx →
ssbx.org
Check out SSBx!
History and Mission
“Sustainable South Bronx (SSBx) is a community organization dedicated to Environmental Justice solutions through innovative, economically sustainable projects that are informed by community needs. In 2001, SSBx was created to address policy and planning issues like land use, energy, transportation, water, waste, education, and, most recently, design and manufacturing.
The Hunts Point neighborhood in the South Bronx is one of New York City’s last remaining industrial areas. On the one hand, the neighborhood has numerous assets, including a waterfront location on the Bronx and East Rivers, proximity to Manhattan, the economic engine of the Hunts Point Food Distribution Center (the second largest in the world), new City‐led development projects, waterfront parks, and a strong local organizational infrastructure. Simultaneously, it exhibits one of the highest poverty and unemployment levels in the City, with poor community health, noxious uses and commercial traffic, substance abuse, and prostitution issues.
Caught in the middle of these pressures are approximately 11,000 residents who have been neglected, under‐served by the neighborhood’s local economy. The one-square mile area of Hunts Point is bound by the Bruckner Expressway to the north and west, and the Bronx and East Rivers to the south and east. ”
Urban Paradox →
seedmagazine.com
Why the future of humanity and the long term sustainability of the planet are inextricably linked to the fate of our cities.
Ecopolis on the Science Channel →
science.discovery.com
interesting stuff!
Six-Part Series Premieres Mon, Dec. 8, at 10 p.m. ET/PT
Halfway through this century, 75 percent of the global population will live in cities. The citizens of these sprawling, ever-growing metropolises will burn through resources like food, water and energy at a rate far outpacing that of people living in nonurban areas. Such mass consumption will result in a very large carbon footprint and large amounts of waste, which most scientists agree will speed global warming and pollute cities to the point that each is almost unlivable.
But science has the ability to change the future of Ecopolis. A blueprint for city life in the year 2050, Ecopolis can benefit from new “green” technologies being explored today that will lead to a more sustainable urban experience tomorrow.
In Science Channel’s groundbreaking new six-part series Ecopolis, Nobel Prize-winning scientist Dr. Daniel Kammen uses the Ecopolis blueprint as a test bed for new technologies that could reshape the environmental circumstances of the future mega-city. Each episode investigates several different visionary, technology-driven solutions to specific future mega-city challenges, such as how to produce enough food and water; find clean and reliable energy sources; reduce our reliance on oil for transportation; discover new ways to manage waste; and, increase the energy efficiency of city buildings.
Dr. Kammen evaluates each innovative solution based on scalability and its ability to reduce harmful carbon dioxide emissions. He chooses one technology per episode, according to which is most effective. In the final episode, he ranks the five previously chosen ideas to determine which is most urgently needed to help revolutionize the ecological fate of future cities.
the future of motorcycles.
electric bikes from BRAMMO (www.brammo.com ), they kind of remind us of a hip cafe-racer, but they do about 15,000 miles on 85 bucks of electricity.
Smarter Cairo
Just came back from Cairo, Africa largest city! Also my first time out of Europe! With over 16Mil people Cairo has by far one of the worst traffic systems I have seen so far. In my 6 days there I spent about 4h in the car daily (I guess that’s why people leave the offices around 4pm). It didn’t matter day or night, if you were lucky it would take you 10 mins less…so not much. Despite that there are additional sources of fun: the dirty air, the dust, the exciting crossing the street or the courageous acts of using public transportation (which I couldn’t :-(…and more). There is a single good thing about traffic in Cairo: there are some good roads. But that’s it! Let’s talk about smarter public transportation, parking spaces or traffic systems. There are hundreds of policemen at each step, let’s see if they can help making Cairo a smarter city!
Shokran (Thanks)!
Nice simple stuff that makes sense from @firstborn_nyc & #Ogilvy — IBM Smarter Cities. http://bit.ly/5ymFFl
“‘If the love of your life walks past you and you’re too engrossed in work to notice, StreetSpark stops you in your tracks. It’s also a great way to break the ice.’ Users fill out their details on the free app or on the StreetSpark website and the network searches for potential dates ranging from ‘ember’ compatibility levels to ‘inferno’. If a person meeting their criteria is nearby they both get sparked – if they both ignite they can start chatting over the network…. It actively searches out people you might want to know while you’re living your normal life, not while you’re sitting at the computer”
—iPhone dating app removes need to even pay attention to other people | Metro.co.uk (via interestingsnippets) (via infoneernet)
Robert Moses or Jane Jacobs? It is no longer either/or →
feedproxy.google.com
(via smarterplanet)
Adam Christensen and Susanne Dirks talked with me about a question being posed by Dana Blankenhorn.
Dana asks an interesting question: are IBM’s “smarter traffic” ideas an homage to Moses or Jacobs?
Breaking Ground with a New Kind of Webcast for the BAO Study: The Breakout “Diavlog” | A Smarter Planet Blog
The new Business Analytics & Optimization (BAO) Study (launching tomorrow, Dec. 9th) is entitled Breakaway because the report found that organizations that were making smarter decisions and applying predictive analytics were starting to put distance between themselves and competitors.
It also found that such breakaway businesses were succeeding, even in these challenging times, by taking intelligent risks and embracing new opportunities.
In that light, tomorrow’s webcast is something of a first for IBM: a live, webcam-enabled video dialog between BAO leader Fred Balboni and James Taylor, co-author with Neil Raden of Smart Enough Systems, a thought leader on the analytics frontier of Enterprise Decision Management, and CEO of Decision Management Solutions.
“innovator beware, it is an inefficient and distressing process plagued by a high failure rate — and a lot of self-delusion. And that is when you are doing it right!”
—Bob Sutton (via designinginnovations)
China Welcomes Carsharing
When stuck in a taxi on one of Beijing’s many clogged ring roads, I’ve often marveled at how empty the other cars are. From the tiny pod-like QQs to the palatial Darth Vader-esque Audi A4s, Beijingers were typically driving alone. Sure, China’s collectivist history — and crowded streets and public transit — would seem conducive to ridesharing and carpooling. But in these fast-developing Chinese cities, the car often symbolizes and delivers a departure from the crowdedness of the street and a fast track to the private comfort of middle-class living. Once in the university district, when stuck in a hot, thick crowd amidst a hot thick traffic jam, crossing the street on my way to the light rail, I found myself envying the privacy of the lone luxury car driver stuck in front of me. Sure, I was moving slightly faster, but he was listening to his radio, the king of his own dumb, fat, mobile castle.
Can these two strains — the selfish and private and the shared and public — find a peaceful co-existence? Wired?
In Wuhan, China, over 200 residents have participated in a groundbreaking new program to reduce pollution and traffic congestion: they’re carpooling.
Despite increasing the ever-present layer of smog in major cities, carpooling has yet to catch on in China. That’s mostly because carpool organizers fear being charged with running an unlicensed taxi service, a strict violation of transportation laws. It’s also why the Wuhan carpoolers require an application process and place signs in their windows that read “Carpooling with neighbors.”
“If ‘carpooling with neighbors’ can be carried out across the entire city, traffic pressure will be significantly alleviated,” an anonymous transport official told China Central Television. Still, he emphasized that “carpooling is illegal if a fee is charged.”
The carpooling project is the work of the residents’ committee of Wuhan’s Changqing Gardens housing complex. Zhang Aoqing, director of the property owner’s committee of the complex’s No.2 sub-community, conducted a survey that found more than 80% of drivers in the community traveled alone.
A few days later, a sign appeared asking residents to join in “carpooling with neighbors.” Twenty drivers signed up to carpool on the first day, with 162 drivers offering rides the next day.
According to CCTV, the community consulted with legal experts to develop a form that riders and drivers could sign to prove that no money was changing hands. Passengers must also pledge to “be totally responsible for their own personal security while carpooling and to not require car owners to take responsibility for safety accidents that may occur while carpooling.”
After nearly a month of sharing rides, there haven’t been any reported incidents of the police harassing carpoolers and the program has expanded to additional communities.
But even if this leads to illegal cabs — as, experience teaches me, it likely will (there are plenty of black cabs across Chinese cities) — that’s still going to be illegal cabs that are helping people get around together, faster and cheaper, using cars that already exist.
—ALEX
Photo: Flickr/ernop
Trapster - Android Speed Trap Alert Application
Trapster is the most popular driving related mobile app in the world (both in cumulative and ongoing daily downloads). It is the first location-based application that alerts users in real-time when they approach speed traps or red-light cameras. It takes advantage of user input and the power of the community to provide not only the trap information, but also to arbitrate the veracity of that information. It also provides turn-by-turn directions, real time traffic, accident reports, gas stations, banks, rest stops, local search, and more. Trapster is free.
“The city moves according to laws that are more powerful and interesting than the traffic ordinances. Try and crack the code.”
— Robert Hurst, The Art of Cycling (via urbancyclist)
