IBM Offers Cash-Strapped Mayors A Smarter City-In-A-Box | Fast Company

For the last two-and-a-half years, IBM has aggressively pursued its Smarter Planet strategy, producing more than 2,000 consulting engagements in cities around the world that want to improve their performance by tapping the data their citizens generate—including a public safety control center for the NYPD, water management for Dubuque, Iowa, and a weather prediction and emergency response system for Rio de Janeiro. Now the company will use those lessons to offer a smarter city-in-a-box to cash-strapped municipalities that want to reap at least some of the benefits of real-time urban analytics.

The Intelligent Operations Center, which IBM will announce today at the Intelligent Cities Forum in Washington, D.C., is a streamlined suite of real-time dashboard, analysis, and data integration tools designed to mimic the more expensive civic control centers it has built in New York and Rio. Over the next 12 months, IBM intends to offer specific modules for public safety, water, and transportation that combine tools to make it easier to connect IBM’s analytical engines with embedded systems.

IBM Brings Watson-Like Sleuthing to Solve Traffic Crisis

As part of its Smarter Cities initiative, IBM last year examined 20 cities on six continents to come up with its first “commuter pain” index (the “winner” — New Delhi).

It’s now tackling gridlock and hoping to make “The Commute” less onerous for city dwellers and workers in a new research project called Smarter Traveler.

How welcome would this be? Let’s put it this way — If they can unlock gridlock, Watson would be a shoo-in for the 2012 US presidential election.

Source: brandchannel

What Makes a Smarter City? IBM Bets on 24 Winners

Source: Fast Company

IBM announced the first batch of cities this week awarded grants as part of the company’s three-year, $50 million Smarter Cities Challenge. The recipients—including New Orleans, Newark, Rio de Janeiro, and Jakarta—are diverse, to say the least. So how did they end up with IBM’s attention, and what happens now?

IBM chose 24 recipients from more than 200 city applicants, all of which were vying for IBM’s expertise in data analytics to tackle problems like crime, education, and budgeting.

The issues in the winning cities are as diverse as the cities themselves. In St. Louis, Mo., for example, IBM has already hit the ground running, with consultants and technology specialists using advanced data analytics to deal with the city’s public safety and education problems. Data analytics are being used to “deploy public safety officers and to figure out which students are most at risk of dropping out, as well as social service needs,” explains Stan Litow, IBM’s Vice President of Corporate Citizenship & Corporate Affairs and President of IBM’s Foundation.

In Chengdu, China, IBM will home in on the local government’s Wireless City initiative, and in Rio de Janeiro, the company will work on infrastructure, environmental, and economic challenges.

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IBM - The Smarter City

To thrive, a city needs to grow. City leaders all over the world have to consider factors related to demographics, globalization, environmental concerns, societal relationships, social stability and technology. TheSmarterCity is no exception. But businesses, like people, have choices on where they locate.