Smarter Cities (Join the Mobility Revolution with These Five Apps...)

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What will make your city smarter? You! Contribute an idea, link or picture: tell a story, propose a project, imagine an intelligent urban future in words, video or however you like.

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Mining the Collaboration with Advanced Analytics

Using some of IBM's expertise in deep data mining and analysis, we will crunch all the content to help develop a SmarterCities Open Model, which cities and groups around the world can build on to start SmarterCities grassroots projects. The data will remain free and open, under Creative Commons license, so that it can grow and be improved over time. This creative output will also flow into and inform work at IBM's new network of Analytics Centers launching around the globe: in Berlin, Tokyo, Beijing, New York, London and Washington, D.C.

SmarterCities is an outgrowth of IBM's Smarter Planet initiative, which is focused on how all the systems in the world -- including food production, healthcare delivery, energy use, traffic and water management -- can become more instrumented, interconnected and, as a result, intelligent.

Cities are the crossroads of these networks. They are also where human populations are increasingly concentrated, with more than 66% of humanity projected to live in major metropolitan areas by 2050.

That's where you come in: building on the Smarter Cities Summit in New York City October 1-2, this Smarter Cities Scan is your opportunity to share ideas, propose projects and learn about the innovations that can help us become a planet of smarter cities. If anything cries out for "crowd sourcing" and collective intelligence, the city as a "system of systems" does.

Smarter Cities Homepage

Get Inspired and Informed

"A vision of smarter cities," by IBMer Susanne Dirks, Manager, Global Centre for Economic Development.

IBM Institute for Business Value study (380KB)

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Join the Mobility Revolution with These Five Apps - Technology Review

Just in time: When’s the bus coming? NextBus takes away the guesswork: the app tells you exactly how many minutes away your bus is. It works using GPS signals from devices installed inside city buses. Boston has signed on, and so has San Francisco, where the app also keeps track of trolleys and cable cars.

NextBus is a 15-year-old company, and it was “tough going” for many years, says chief technology officer Michael Smith. Originally, riders got updates by calling a number or consulting bus-stop displays. Now the rise of smart phones has made the system much more powerful. About 30 percent of NextBus’s 800,000 daily users access the app via iPhones or other smart devices.

NextBus charges transit agencies a few hundred dollars per bus per year to use its service, and more if the buses don’t have GPS yet. The fee Los Angeles pays to use the software in its 2,500-vehicle fleet: $1.5 million over three years. But that’s quickly made back in increased ridership. Bus-stop haters can now arrive just in time.