People’s Choice Voting for IBM SmartCamp London Kickstart!

Your vote matters: we want to know who YOU would choose to win this year’s London SmartCamp KickStart People’s Choice! Our judges will choose an overall winner on Oct. 5th, but we will also announce the results of this vote to crown a People’s Choice Winner. So if you think a company has the smartest start-up for Smarter Cities, cast your vote below! For more information on each of these innovative startups, read their descriptions here.
Audio Analytic
Audio Analytic makes software that classify sounds by computer analysis, sounds like Aggression, Gunshots, Glass Break and Car Alarms.

MMVSense
MMVSENSE is a technology start-up specialising in wearable sensors and online services for the health monitoring and wellbeing market.

Activity4Charity Nesta Jun12 from Luke Murrell on Vimeo.

Quorate Technology
Quorate is developing a conversational speech recognition technology that can be used to search audio files for keywords and to automatically create transcripts of conversations.

Viewsy
Viewsy is a location analytics solution for the physical world. We provide a way to digitise an analogue world, turning visitor foot traffic into measurable insights that can be analysed and acted upon.

Viewsy Launch party 1min30 from Viewsy on Vimeo.

Voicesecure
VoiceSecure have developed the UK award winning Emergency Rest Centre (ERC), software installed throughout many UK Councils and Government. ERC has been designed to provide you with the ability to understand, manage and provide targeted resources for your emergency situations. ERC enables response personnel to predefine their emergency response logistics e.g. the Region, associated Rest and Recuperation Centres, units of water, evacuee capacity, numbers of beds etc. In the event of a disaster on-site response personnel can input numbers of categories and the associated details at each rest centre. The information entered at the individual rest centre or rapidly established evacuation reception point is also available at any command centre that has the appropriate security clearances. This ensures that a command centre can be in full charge of the situation and manage respite resources with the best possible information.

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“Houston Mayor Annise Parker on Tuesday will launch the city of Houston’s IBM Smarter Cities Challenge project. Parker, Department of Neighborhoods Director Katye Tipton, IBM’s Beth Tracy and Mayor’s Office of Education Initiatives Manager Mark Cueva will hold the kick-off event from 10:30 a.m. to noon at City Hall. IBM in March selected Houston for the approximately $400,000 grant. Over three years, IBM has selected 100 cities for the grant program. Houston was the first Texas city selected. Through Aug. 24, a five-member team of IBM experts will create a plan for streamlining online access to services, resources and information for Houstonians, according to an Aug. 6 statement from the city.”

Houston to launch IBM Smarter Cities Challenge grant project - Houston Business Journal

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Dubuque Iowa, Building Constituencies on a Smarter Planet (by IBMSocialMedia)

How do you lead change to make things better in a smarter planet? Dubuque Iowa is working together across public and private organizations to drive change … in partnership with IBM. The city of Dubuque has come together and grown from an unemployment rate which was the highest in the United States at 23% in 1984 to having an unemployment rate that’s less than the state average. Running on a sustainability platform in 2005 Mayor Roy Buol was elected and then re-elected by working collaboratively across local, state and federal lines. The city is a model of how to built constituency—one that transformed Dubuque into “one of the 10 smartest cities on the planet”. The leadership lessons of Dubuque extend beyond issues of state and local government and sustainability to what can work for organizations of all sizes public or private, local or global.

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IBM team helping Providence improve building-permit process | The Providence Journal

In this city celebrating its 375th anniversary, the process of getting a building permit has become complicated over the centuries, involving multiple offices and multiple approvals.

“Cities are struggling with how to streamline this process,” says Tracy J. McNairn, an IBM employee who is part of a company team that has descended on Providence for three weeks to help the city make one part of its bureaucracy run better.

McNairn adds that a Google search turned up about a million hits related to cities trying to improve their own processes for handling building permits. Plus, she says, “they’re all under financial constraints and pressures and always looking to save money.”

The IBM team wants to make sure that people seeking building permits don’t need to walk in one door to get one piece of a project done only to walk in and out of many other doors before taking care of all the necessary steps, says Cathleen Finn, IBM’s New England manager for corporate citizenship and affairs.

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“Today, municipalities and citizens more than ever need to understand their patterns of behavior and how to change them. Whether it is in water consumption, traffic patterns or energy use, they need new technologies to enable the change. Our sustainability initiatives in Dubuque prove that, by using advanced analytics, community engagement, and cloud computing, government officials and citizens will have access to real-time data to alter their patterns of behavior, which will save them money. This water sustainability pilot case is a template for communities worldwide that seek to conserve various types of resources.”

Quote by Milind Naphade, program director, smarter city services, IBM Research.  Quote found at “Dubuque, Iowa and IBM Combine Analytics, Cloud Computing and Community Engagement to Conserve Water”

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The power of analytics for public sector: Building analytics competency to accelerate outcomes Complex societal, economic, political and environmental pressures are placing intense demands on public sector organizations to make smarter decisions, deliver results and demonstrate accountability. An unprecedented “information explosion” both facilitates and complicates the ability of governments and institutions to achieve and influence desirable outcomes. A tremendous opportunity exists to use the growing mountain of data to make better fact-based decisions. Yet, the volume of data and its increasingly diverse and interactive nature can also paralyze organizations as they try to separate the noteworthy from the not-worthy. Download the executive summary (786KB) Register to download the complete IBM Institute for Business Value executive report via smarterplanet:

The power of analytics for public sector: Building analytics competency to accelerate outcomes

Complex societal, economic, political and environmental pressures are placing intense demands on public sector organizations to make smarter decisions, deliver results and demonstrate accountability.

An unprecedented “information explosion” both facilitates and complicates the ability of governments and institutions to achieve and influence desirable outcomes. A tremendous opportunity exists to use the growing mountain of data to make better fact-based decisions. Yet, the volume of data and its increasingly diverse and interactive nature can also paralyze organizations as they try to separate the noteworthy from the not-worthy.

via smarterplanet:

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Business analytics software helps zoo increase revenue and visits

smarterplanet:

The Cincinnati Zoo expects a $350,000 jump in revenue the first year and an additional 50,000 new visits through its use of business analytics from IBM.

The zoo wanted to maximize a recent increase in attendance and raise guest spending, which would allow management to provide increased…

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Executive Exchange Editor's Corner: Building smarter cities: a new IBM commitment

editorcorneronee:

IBM announced a new initiative today — the Smarter Cities Challenge, a competitive grant program in which IBM will award $50 million worth of technology and services to help 100 municipalities across the globe over the next three years.

To be considered, city leaders need to apply via the …

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What’s one major consequence of a city becoming a booming economic center? Increased traffic that leads to mind-numbing, stop-and-go commutes. IBM surveyed drivers in 20 of the world’s metropolises to see which city’s drivers experienced most traffic-related woes. Its Commuter Pain Index takes into account factors such as time drivers spent stuck in traffic, high gas prices, stress and anger caused by long commutes, and even instances where the specter of a bumper-to-bumper drive pushes drivers to cancel trips. Check out the results here.

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