Smart City Hub

Hi everybody,

Smart City Hub provides cutting edge intelligence for professionals and decision makers working in smart cities worldwide.

Do you have a good story, service, product or other kind of smart city initiative? Than we would like to interview you.

Or do you want to become a knowledge authority and publish your blogs under your own name? Smart City Hub can offer you the podium.

Interested? Have a look at http://www.smartcityhub.com and send me an e-mail.

Thank you.

Egbert

On December 6 and 7 the Smart Cities Summit was organised in Boston. Here stakeholders from the public & private-sector ecosystems met to help tomorrow’s cities face the challenges of growing urban populations with the latest IoT technology.

The common theme was that data is an enabler and an asset that municipalities are trying to wrangle. Dominick Tribone, customer experience lead for Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, said that his group is using information from ridership and transactions to enhance services. But there are limitations. Tribone noted that the MBTA knows when someone checks in to the system, but has to infer when that person gets off.

"We want to get to real-time trip planning," said Tribone.

Meanwhile, Paul Comfort, CEO, Maryland Transit Administration (MTA), said his group is revamping routes to ease congestion in Baltimore with a hub-and-spoke system. Technologies will be used to hold the light green for busses and align connections between bus and trains.

"We collected two years of data on the transportation system, where the jobs are and where people are really going," said Comfort. "We're removing 1,000 stops from our system because people weren't using them. Data is helping us do that."'

Nearly every CIO noted that smart city projects revolve around how data is being used. For instance Kansas City is using data from Google's Waze and sucking in information available via public application programming interfaces.

What executives cautioned is that flooding smart city projects with data may not work due to access, analytics, availability and the ability to turn big data into insights. There are also privacy issues that abound. "There's a balance between having enough information to improve service and privacy," said Tribone.

Hi all,

I created the Smart City Hub Group on LinkedIn so professionals and decision makers working in smart cities worldwide can get cutting edge intelligence about smart city projects around the world.

In this forum you get the latest news, trends and strategies about all aspects of smart cities, like city management, traffic, security, energy & water supply, citizen services, ICT, housing and building.

Are you a civil servant or politician? Please visit the group and click on 'join group'.

Plus, here are some other things we will talk about and resources you will find:
· Topic of the week: Each week I will post a new Topic for discussion. I invite you to share your thoughts and expertise.
· The power of many: In the group you can interact with and learn from professionals and decision makers working in smart cities worldwide.
· More perspectives: With insights from other professionals we can learn even more. Our collective knowledge is powerful. And I know you have some good ideas to contribute as well.

Sounds interesting? I hope so. I invite you to get engaged in discussions, ask questions and share your thoughts right now. Best of all, it does not cost you anything.

Let’s make our cities smart.

Egbert