Suzuki has launched a hybrid gasoline/electric vehicle for sale on the Japanese market that travels an impressive 100 miles per gallon of gas! The Suzuki Twin also features an automatic idling stop system shuts the engine down whenever the car stops at traffic lights or when stationary in heavy traffic, minimizing CO’ emissions and fuel consumption.
OpenCongress API: OpenCongress brings together official government data with news and blog coverage to give users the real story behind each bill. The OpenCongress API also developers to access all this data for their website or application.
The TownMe API includes both read and write geo-related services. The read side has a reverse geocoder which helps translate coordinates into human readable elements or associations. For instance, give the API “37.78093,-122.409415″ and it will return information about the census tract, neighborhood, city, MSA, and state that contains these coordinates
On October 1 and 2 IBM held its second global Smarter Cities conference in New York City. The first such conference was held in Berlin this past June, and the third will be held in Shanghai next year. As was the case with Berlin, the New York Smarter Cities event had a very impressive agenda. It included talks by IBM Chairman and CEO Sam Palmisano, New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, and Melody Barnes, Director of the White House Domestic Policy Council. The agenda also included panels with governors, mayors, and leaders of cultural institutions. In addition, there were break-out discussions to enable participants to share their experiences on what it takes to build a smarter city in six key areas: transportation, education, public safety, energy and utilities, government services and healthcare. I helped organize and moderated the healthcare session. Our panel included Denis Cortese - CEO and President of the Mayo Clinic; Ronald Paulus - Chief Technology and Innovation Officer at the Geisinger Health System; Chris Coburn - Executive Director of Innovations at the Cleveland Clinic; and Armando Ahued Ortega - Health Secretary of Mexico City.
Truck 2020: Overcoming turbulent times for sustainable prosperity. In the face of multidimensional challenges, the truck industry finds itself in need of immediate transformation.
On Tuesday, Oct. 27th, a convoy of dozens of hybrid trucks will be rolling through Atlanta on their way to the Hybrid Truck 2009 National Conference at the Georgia World Congress Center. As part of the conference, IBM will also be publishing its new study, Truck2020, which examines the critical role that next generation trucking will play in making cities, supply chains, retail businesses and many aspects of our planet smarter, greener and more innovative.
Speaking of next generations, many kids ( and plenty of grownup kids) love trucks. To feed that passion and promote interest in this emerging high-tech industry, IBM’s Institute for Business Value, which produced the Truck2020 report, is organizing a multimedia collaboration via Twitter for spectators and convoy participants. We’re calling it a “TwitStop.” See details on how people in the Atlanta area can be part of this social media mashup.
According to the United Nations 170,000 square kilometers of forest is destroyed each year. If we constructed solar farms at the same rate, we would be finished in 3 years.
New: I did a little revisioning, adding another power source we possibly haven’t considered. From LandArtGenerator.org.
“New York has been a pioneer among cities in the use of computing firepower to sift through data to improve services. It began in the 1990s with the city’s CompStat system for mapping, identifying and predicting crime. The system, combined with new policing practices, reduced crime rates in New York and was later adopted by Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Baltimore and other cities.
In 2002, the city began its “311” telephone number for answering questions about government services and to report problems down to missing manhole covers. The service receives 50,000 calls a day, and earlier this year began operating on the Web as well. Complaints, response times and resolved problems are tracked and measured to improve performance.
In 2006, the city began an online service, NYC Business Express, to make it easier and faster to start a business. The average time to obtain a building permit, for example, has been cut to 7 days from 40. Such seemingly mundane improvements can add up to big gains in the efficiency of government service systems, experts say, nurturing productivity and growth in local economies. The process, they say, is similar to “lean manufacturing,” a system first mastered by Toyota in which step-by-step changes on the factory floor, made repeatedly, translate into major advances in quality and productivity.”
On Tuesday, Oct. 27th, a convoy of dozens of hybrid trucks will be rolling through Atlanta on their way to the 
