I’ve recently attended the IoT Show in SIngapre to catch up what’s going on in the World with Smart Cities.
I went to lots of presentations by people form all around the world, including Singapre, Hong-Kong, Japan etc and it was very interesting.
In Singapore, they’re really serious about “Smart City Development”. I’m wondering if there is any discussion about this in Canberra?
Was anybody addressing the challenge that traditional assets which are now being made “IoT” typically have very small maintenance and support budgets - “set and forget”, for 10+ years at a time?
It seems there’s a massive disconnect between the economic incentives that drive “normal” application software development (namely: software is the product - so it’s all about user experience, wide consumer/userbase exposure) and embedded software, where software is (often) an afterthought and development seems to go along the lines of:
Does it compile? Does a new version add validate/re-certification/compliance costs? Can we really patch our libraries and fix bugs or features without impacting users’ integration solutions? What precautions should the service bulletin state? What hardware revs do our embedded CPUs really have across the fleet. etc.
Probably the opposite of that.
I’ll post back some photo’s of slides from various presenters but there wasn’t much weight to ‘set and forget’ type of operation. Probably the opposite, in that the systems were going to need more ‘Cloud Services’, more maintainance, and most importantly, ‘more money’.
The Japanese Goals were to create a ‘Hydrogen City’, ie with Honda Generators and Toyota Hydrogen cars.
One Singapore objective was to create Driverless Car Testing facilities. http://smart.mit.edu/news-a-events/press-room/article/42-smart-launches-first-singapore-developed-driverless-car-designed-for-operations-on-public-roads-.html
There was even a space mentioned here in Europe to create a Drone Airspace Management System for Europe. Something that could be developed in Canberra, or anywhere for instance. For example, like a commercial aircraft management system, only able to cope with thousands/millions of Drones that are expected to take to the sky’s in coming decades. To prevent crashes, allocate and license airspace and a few other of licensing requirements.
In Hong Kong, they’re got a few ideas going including controlling people’s aircons from the power station to minimize peaks.
Here’s a list of the Top 10 Smart Cities for 2015
Quickly:
1.) Vienna.
2.) Toronto
3.) Paris.
4.) New York
5.) London.
6.) Tokyo.
7.) Berlin.
8.) Copenhagen.
9.) Hong Kong.
10.) Barcelona.
