climateadaptation: Urban Renewal These 10 global infrastructure and tech companies are among the early leaders in smart-city programs. “Like Siemens and ABB, most of the beneficiaries of urbanization will be infrastructure and technology outfits that provide or utilize smartphones, sensors and software and services to track the use of a city’s assets and commit resources when and where they’re needed. Cloud technology, which can cut costs while boosting computing capacity, will play a big role. Even social media will participate, as cities multiply the ways a citizen can spot a problem–anything from a water-main break to a traffic snarl–and then alert others to avoid it or do something about it. Technology researchers at IDC estimate the size of the smart-city information-technology market is now $34 billion annually and will gain 18%-plus a year to $57 billion by 2014. That’s not a huge amount to global giants, but certainly enough to help drive growth. (The companies don’t break out earnings related to these projects.) The market has broadened to include items like broadband connectivity, green belts, renewable energy, green buildings and other intelligent-city systems. “You are talking about smart water, smart transportation, better public safety,” says Jennifer Bélissent, a consultant at Forrester.” Source: Barron’s “Dawn of the Smart City” Related articles “The bias lurking behind every large-scale smart city is a belief that bottom-up complexity can be…” (underpaidgenius.com) Those Pesky Humans: Urban Planning and its Discontents (blogcritics.org) Why The U.S. Government Should Embrace Smart Cities (fastcompany.com)
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climateadaptation:

Urban Renewal

These 10 global infrastructure and tech companies are among the early leaders in smart-city programs.

“Like Siemens and ABB, most of the beneficiaries of urbanization will be infrastructure and technology outfits that provide or utilize smartphones, sensors and software and services to track the use of a city’s assets and commit resources when and where they’re needed. Cloud technology, which can cut costs while boosting computing capacity, will play a big role. Even social media will participate, as cities multiply the ways a citizen can spot a problem–anything from a water-main break to a traffic snarl–and then alert others to avoid it or do something about it.

Technology researchers at IDC estimate the size of the smart-city information-technology market is now $34 billion annually and will gain 18%-plus a year to $57 billion by 2014. That’s not a huge amount to global giants, but certainly enough to help drive growth. (The companies don’t break out earnings related to these projects.) The market has broadened to include items like broadband connectivity, green belts, renewable energy, green buildings and other intelligent-city systems. “You are talking about smart water, smart transportation, better public safety,” says Jennifer Bélissent, a consultant at Forrester.”

Source: Barron’s “Dawn of the Smart City”

Related articles

Must Be International Look-For-A-Job Day

So, I noted earlier that Cisco shut down Flip, but then I saw that Flock and Download Squad are also headed for oblivion. And Nokia is sharpening the ax for a ton of its workers, too.

Sigh. This is the downside of all this technological innovation, when the failures — so easily held up as a necessary and valuable entrepreneurial learning experience — lead to people being fired, livelihoods ended, and all the human pain and turmoil that follows.

All of that because our insatiable need for shiny shiny toys.

Lewis Mumford once wrote

Western society has accepted as unquestionable a technological imperative that is quite as arbitrary as the most primitive taboo: not merely the duty to foster invention and constantly to create technological novelties, but equally the duty to surrender to these novelties unconditionally, just because they are offered, without respect to their human consequences.

And here are some of those direct and human consequences.

Cisco To Shut Down Flip Video Camera Business; Will Give Pink Slips To 550 Employees

Closing down a lot of the comsumer products at Cisco, including Flip, as Leena Rao reports:

Cisco has just issued a release stating that in a strategic plan to “align its operations,” the company will exit parts of its consumer businesses and realign the remaining consumer business to support four of its five key company priorities: core routing, switching and services; collaboration; architectures; and video. One of the casualties of this realignment: Cisco’s video camera Flip business, which was part of its $590 million acquisition of Pure Digital.

As part of the plan, Cisco will close down its Flip business and “support current FlipShare customers and partners with a transition plan.” Cisco will also refocus its Home Networking business and will integrate Cisco umi into the company’s Business TelePresence product line. As part of the transition, Cisco plans to eliminate 550 jobs.

Flip didn’t really make sense in 2009, when video was available on cell phones and the writing was on the wall. This is Cisco retrenchment from throwing around a lot of ready cash, and trying to refocus on the business sector.

I bet Cisco will be acquired within the year. All of this cleaning up — and passing along the costs in the form of stock valuation falling — will make the company attractive to people like IBM, Oracle, or Microsoft.

Seeing The World Through Risk-Colored Glasses

The proliferation of consumer-based social networking throughout
enterprise organizations is creating a significant amount of security
risk that needs to be better understood and carefully managed before
it’s too late, according to the results of a global study commissined by Cisco, which revealed a widespread and growing need for more policies, processes and IT architecture.


The study, which was designed to assess how organizations use
consumer social networking tools to collaborate externally and how such
use is governed, found that the use of consumer-based social networking
tools - such as Facebook and Twitter - as collaboration platforms is
connecting organizations with the external world unprecedented ways.


But while these tools have the promise to better marry technology
and business, link people and information, establish potential new
routes to market, and enhance customer intimacy and brand awareness,
the business world is still only in the early stages of identifying key
challenges, such as the need for increased governance and IT
involvement.

via www.marketingcharts.com

In principle, I have no problem discussing the risks in companies adopting social technologies.

However, when some groups or individuals start out with an agenda the fear and aversion factor may be dialed way up — in this case the studies involved were commissioned by Cisco. Cisco has — no surprise — a sizable security business, and is moving into the business of telling others how to secure their social technologies and practices.

The Future of Social Networking and Collaboration Tools in the Enterprise


  • Across the board, respondents recognized that consumer-based social
    networking and collaboration tools will continue to evolve, as will
    their complexity, and that these tools will continue to influence the
    way business is conducted. The key for organizations will be the way
    they adopt and integrate these tools into the enterprise IT environment.

  • The following issues need to be addressed regarding the adoption,
    deployment and governance of social networking in the enterprise: when,
    how and what initiatives are to be launched (and not launched); how the
    enabling technologies should be managed; and how employee use of these
    technologies should be managed.

I will leave aside the question of ‘managing’ employee use of social networking for another time, perhaps if and when I get a chance to talk to people at Cisco.

I think companies starting on a path toward exploiting social networks for the business should be 90% offense and 10% defense. Cisco may be trying to reverse the ratios.