Menlo Park, California-Big Brother is here. And he's selling parking spots.
Sensors and the applications that can run on them were the main focus of start-ups at SmartCamp, a global business plan contest sponsored by IBM. Ten years ago, companies like Dust Networks and Intel were showing off proto applications for the "extroverted computing" market, a term I made up in 2003 that failed to catch on. SynapSense and others brought sensors to the data center a few years ago. Now, other applications are coming to market.
StreetLine, for instance, showed off a system that effectively allows consumers to find and reserve parking spots while they drive. The company embeds mesh sensors (which include technology from Dust) into parking spots that communicate with drivers. Drivers can also put more money into the meter remotely via a cell phone. Streetline, along with medical IT company CloudCare, shared the grand prize. The two now go to the international finals in SmartCamp later this year.
Ideally, information on available spots will free up streets.
"Thirty to 35 percent of the traffic in a city is caused by people looking for parking," said CEO Zia Yusuf.
The city benefits too. Only around 6 percent of expired meter violations are ever ticketed or collected. With StreetLine, enforcement officers know exactly at any given moment which cars have run out of time. It also can tell cash collectors which meters have the most coins in them. Trial cities have seen an increase in enforcement levels. San Francisco has installed 3,500 meters and wants to impose dynamic pricing, i.e. letting consumers outbid each other for prime spots. Rigging a parking spot up, including the amortized price of the software and repeaters, comes to around $250. European start-up World Sensing has a similar application but is not as far along.
"The payback can be in months," he said, describing parking spots as "a 20 foot by five foot increasingly valuable piece of real estate."
In a slightly different use of sensors, iFind showed off a tagging system called Wandering Shepherd for cattle and other livestock that monitors their temperature via satellite. If a cow or group of cows suddenly experiences a temperature spike, that can be an early sign of an outbreak of hoof and mouth disease or Mad Cow. Those cows can then be quarantined. Airborne diseases among cattle can travel 50 miles a day.
"Within ten days it can be across 25 states," said CEO Neil Helfrich.
Two Canadian ranches will start field trials in the first quarter of next year. The USDA is looking at sensors to track six kinds of livestock.
It can also track movement. So if a cow starts traveling at 60 miles an hour, it could be another case of rustling.
Next, iFind wants to develop an application that can trace meet from the hoof to the package. (Brazil is working on a similar technology.)
Then there was AquaCue, which developed a sensor and software package that reads water meters and delivers the information to a distant computer or cell phones. Now, utilities send out a reader every other month to check your meter.
The system costs $400 and many consumers pay only $1 a day for water. So how do you make it worthwhile? Leaks. A leak can cost $3,500.
"32 percent of all home insurance claims are leaks," said Shahram Javey, CEO. Hence, your insurer may pay for it. When Javey was testing his prototype in his own home, he discovered a leak.
AquaCue has also created a behavioral application that gives consumers a smiley face/frown sort of grade to improve their water consumption. In early trials, water consumption was reduced 11 to 26 percent.
Other companies: CitySourced has a cell phone app that let people report potholes and other issues to city agencies.
Seventh Generation took down a video on its website after Procter & Gamble challenged ads that imply Seventh Generation's products do not contain hazardous chemicals and are completely natural.
Vancouver wants to be the greenest city in the world by 2020. At the Shanghai World Expo, mayor Gregor Robertson announced a partnership with Cisco and Pulse Energy, a Vancouver-based energy management system company.
"Going green isn't just good for the environment; it is good for business," Robertson said in a teleconference from Shanghai.
Pulse Energy CEO David Helliwell and Cisco Canada president Nitin Kawale were on the call with the mayor.
Cisco has been pushing city design and management as a way to increase efficiency. Like IBM, the company wants to treat energy holistically. Through building energy management, home energy management, carbon-footprint reduction, and data center efficiency, the lofty goal of building the greenest city doesn't seem so far off.
Cisco has launched pilot programs in Amsterdam, Seoul, and San Francisco, and has set up campuses in places like South Korea and India, and now Vancouver is joining the club.
Existing and future products will come together in a big network for the grid. Enter the Internet of Things: Cisco owns Linksys routers, and they sell switches and hubs.
The Cisco Home Energy Management system is basically a dashboard for your home. Just like the dashboard in your car that tells you when you are going to run out of fuel, the home dashboard will tell customers what their energy consumption is in real-time.
Knowledge can help change behavior, or at least it can in theory. The company says customers could reduce their overall energy use anywhere from 4 percent to 15 percent if they got real-time feedback.
The mayor hopes to make buildings more efficient to cut down the city's greenhouse gas emissions. To achieve this, the Cisco Network Building Mediator will check up on the energy consumption on a few city buildings like City Hall.
Considering that nearly half of all city energy use is consumed in buildings, being able to regularly check up on the buildings will help them become more efficient.
People can get tips on reducing their carbon footprints and look at climate change information using Cisco's internet-based tool, Urban EcoMap. Everything you want to know about neighborhood energy use and carbon emissions from transportation can be seen on this tool.
The mayor hopes partnerships like the one announced today will help make Vancouver a living lab culture that can spark innovation in the cleantech space. Vancouver is one of the many cities Cisco is working with.
With 700 million people moving to cities in the next decade and 100 new cities with a million people each expected to crop up by 2025, the big energy drain that powers megacities will only continue to increase. With 20 megacities consuming 75 percent of the total energy used on the planet, perhaps Vancouver's plan for becoming the greenest city might inspire others to follow suit.
But with energy so cheap in Canada due to BC Hydro's Electric Generation System, will Canadians even care if their energy is greener?
The mayor thinks so. Robertson is hopeful that BC Hydro will partner with them to ease the load on the city's energy supply. However, the possible partnership is a work in progress -- as are other opportunities to build out the energy infrastructure and to encourage retrofitting in buildings.
"This collaboration will help drive a transformational showcase of world-class green initiatives and technologies in the city of Vancouver. These initial pilot projects and subsequent field trials also provide the opportunity to further stimulate green economic development opportunities in the Vancouver and B.C. Lower Mainland, creating a new category of green-collar jobs," Kawale said in the call. The new software market will create jobs, he emphasized.
Working Excellence is a certified B-CORP!
Working Excellence is very proud to announce that it has just been certified as a B Corporation.
B Corporations are a new type of corporation which uses the power of business to solve social and environmental problems. B Corporations are unlike traditional responsible businesses because they:
- Meet comprehensive and transparent social and environmental performance standards.
- Institutionalize stakeholder interests.
- Build collective voice through the power of a unifying brand.
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| "All is connected, no one thing can change by itself." Paul Hawken | ||
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