Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Category: government

  • Touring the Barcelona smart city project

    Touring the Barcelona smart city project

    Last year I posted the Geek’s Tour of Barcelona, looking at the town’s smartcity initiatives after visiting the city for Cisco’s Internet of Things World Forum.

    At the Australian Internet of Things Forum in Newcastle last month I cobbled together a quick presentation around the topic to illustrate what smartcities can deliver.

    This was particularly topical for Newcastle as the New Lunaticks and the local business community are supporting the Kaooma project run by Vimoc Technologies in one of the city’s entertainment districts.

    Kaooma – which is an entrant in Cisco’s IoT Innovation Grand Challenge – is particularly interesting because it’s a wholly private project with little, if any, formal government support as opposed to London’s Regent Street Internet of Things initiative that’s part of a billion pound regeneration of the precinct.

    Australia’s Newcastle, the world’s largest coal port, has a number of challenges itself as the country’s once in a century mining boom unwinds and city deals with a neglected downtown in the face of a rapidly changing economy.

    While the Barcelona project is in early days, the presentation shows how cities are using the Internet of Things today and gives us some hints on how those uses will evolve over time.

    Paul travelled to Barcelona as a guest of Cisco Systems

    Similar posts:

    • No Related Posts
  • Building an internet we’re not ashamed of

    Building an internet we’re not ashamed of

    Late last month writer, painter and software developer Maciej Ceglowski spoke at the design and technology conference, Beyond Tallerand in Dusseldorf.

    The Internet with a Human Face is his closing keynote for the conference – let’s try to kill that kill that awful term ‘locknote’ for closing presentations – and is a wonderful overview of the unintended consequences of the internet we’re now seeing emerge.

    Maciej compares the internet’s effects with that of the motor car in the Twentieth Century – the rise of the automobile totally changed society in ways our great grandparents couldn’t have expected.

    Unexpected consequences

    In many respects the changes were positive; the age of the motor car saw massive increases in living standards through the second half of the century. However the immediate downside of those efficient supply chains were equally massive increases in obesity rates, suburban alienation and urban sprawl.

    A similar thing is happening with this wave of technological changes; as Maciej describes in our presentation, our views of how the web was going to evolve is turning out to be very different to what we expected.

    One great example is in small business advertising where we expected online channels would democratise marketing. Instead the exact opposite has happened.

    Maciej’s view is far broader than just the relatively trivial problem of small business advertising, particularly with the ‘Internet never forgetting’ with the concentration of the industry in one of the world’s great earthquake zones as another major risk.

    Building an internet we’re not ashamed of

    Ultimately, though Maciej sees the problems facing the internet industry as a design problem.

    “I have no idea how to fix it. I’m hoping you’ll tell me how to fix it. But we should do something to fix it. We can try a hundred different things. You people are designers; treat it as a design problem! How do we change this industry to make it wonderful again? How do we build an Internet we’re not ashamed of?”

    While being ashamed is a big call, and probably unfair in that it’s like blaming Henry Ford for 2014 childhood obesity rates in Minnesota, Maciej has flagged that there are real adverse unintended consequences to the way the internet is evolving.

    All of us involved in the industry need to recognise those adverse effects and start acting to fix these problems.

    Similar posts:

    • No Related Posts
  • The race to build smartcities

    The race to build smartcities

    For the last decade city administrations have been jostling for the title of being a ‘smartcity’ – a metropolis that brings together technology, creativity and business to grow their local economy. Now the competition is getting fierce.

    While the concept has been around since British Prime Minister Harold Wilson coined the phrase the Great White Heat of Technology fifty years ago, the arrival of the Internet of Things, cheap sensors and accessible wireless broadband have made wiring up a city far more easier than a decade ago.

    So now we’re seeing a race to set up smartcities with just the last week seeing Kansas City join the Cisco Connected Communities program, a consortium of  UK technology groups announced Milton Keynes will be wired up and French machine to machine (M2M) network provider Sigfox launched its plan to add San Francisco to the cities it’s covering.

    Kansas City is a particularly interesting location being the first town to recieve Google Fiber and  its designated Innovation Precinct along the new street car route the city is building. The Connected Cities scheme will cover that corridor.

    Kansas City’s Innovation Corridor isn’t a new idea, it’s not dissimilar to the Digital Sydney project I put together a few years ago. The difference is it has both government commitment to it and a business community energised around the possiblities. Whether that’s enough to make it a success remains to be seen.

    What is clear though is that today’s technologies are changing cities, just as roads and electricity did in the Twentieth Century and steam traction, railways and town water did in the Nineteenth.

    That’s why the race to build smart cities is so important for communities that care about where they want to be in the 21st Century economy.

    Similar posts:

    • No Related Posts
  • If you need government money, do you really have a business?

    If you need government money, do you really have a business?

    Australia’s new Federal government handed down its first budget yesterday with savage cuts to scientific research, training and business support.

    I dissected the implications of the budget for businesses in a piece for Technology Spectator with the conclusion that modern Australia is turning its back on technology, the young and the entrepreneurial.

    None of which will come as a surprise to this site’s regular readers.

    Some of the critics of my Tech Spec piece made the point that if your business relies on government grants then you aren’t really an entrepreneur.

    I’d tend to agree with that, having spent a few months working for a state agency responsible for business development programs I realised that for most businesses the time cost of applying for and administering a government grant was often greater than the value they received from the programs.

    So government grants aren’t the entrepreneurial manna that many people believe.

    What’s worse, governments can axe these programs at short notice which leaves the businesses short handed. Which is exactly what happened last night.

    Indeed that’s the problem for Australian businesses, each time a government changes the new administration axes the previous one’s programs and this lack of certainty and continuity is one of my concerns about the viability of Australia’s startup scene.

    The truth is though, if your business does need government funds to survive then you’re at the mercy of bureaucrat’s whim rather than the rigours of the market.

    If you’re comfortable with owing your existence to a bureaucrat then you probably don’t really have a business and you certainly aren’t an entrepreneur.

    Similar posts:

  • Connecting bridges to the internet of things

    Connecting bridges to the internet of things

    On Networked Globe today I have a description of NICTA’s Sydney Harbour Bridge Monitoring Project where the research agency is rolling out 800 sensors across the structure to reduce maintenance costs.

    The project a good example of how cheap sensors and abundant computing power is changing workplaces, connecting the bridge to the Internet of Things makes it easier for asset managers and engineers to understand what is happening to their structure.

    While the project promises a lot, it’s only a fraction of what’s possible as the sensors are only measuring movements so there’s a lot more they can do.

    The big promise though is for smaller structures than the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Around the world local governments are struggling to maintain their assets, if NICTA can develop a feasible monitoring product then many agencies will be looking at how they can reduce their budgets.

    While we tend to focus on connected kettles and other household devices when we talk about the internet of things, the real benefits and profits lie in the ‘big iron’ industrial and infrastructure applications.

    Similar posts: