by John Koetsier, Venturebeat.com
Cutting emergency response times in Rio de Janeiro by 30 percent? Reducing pollution in San Francisco’s Bay Area? Eliminating traffic congestion in Lyon, France?
Those are all things you can do … if you make your city smarter.
IBM calls it Intelligent Operations Center (IOC), and in the past three years has led over 2,000 projects to “monitor, measure, and manage city services such as water systems, public safety, transportation, hospitals, electricity grids, and buildings.” Just this past week, the company announced new projects in South Bend, Indiana, Davao, Philippines, and Lyon, France.
In each of them, the company will be working to add sensors to everyday infrastructure, install software to integrate and manage the massive inflow of data, and provide city officials with the information and intelligence they need to run their cities better. Hopefully, the result will be better, more livable, and more sustainable urban environments.
VentureBeat spoke to Chris O’Connor, IBM’s vice president in charge of engineering and smart city products, to find out what makes IOC tick. And to learn what might be the future of smart cities … an operating system for reality.
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