BayBrazil & partner organization GABA present:
Connected Cities Creating New Business Opportunities
Date: Thursday, Oct 10, 2013, 6pm-9pm
Location: SAP 3410 Hillview Avenue, building 1, Palo Alto, CA
Technology is transforming our communities. As mobile communications and sensors pervade our surroundings, vast new data streams will be generated about economic activity and environmental conditions. Cloud computing promises to allow us to make sense of these diverse data streams and enable nearly real-time analysis, command and control. In doing so, cloud computing will hopefully also enable “smarter” forms of infrastructure and connected vehicles that will lead to more efficient use of resources, lower operating cost for businesses, a cleaner environment, and a better quality of life.
This new degree of smartness and transparency carries great potential to finally integrate more seamlessly the needs of our businesses with those of our consumers and our communities to become more sustainable as we pursue new growth horizons. The need to do so is particularly evident in the world’s urban centers, which are the hubs of our modern economic activity. These centers have been touted to have a lower per capita ecological footprint than broadly distributed populations do. But whether they can fulfill that promise remains to be seen. The growing demand for natural resources in those urban mega-centers requires us to innovate and create new ways of doing things, lest we want to continue on the path of ecological overshoot with all of its externalities.
Cloud computing offers an ideal platform for that kind of innovation, as evidenced by some powerful examples and key questions:
- How does connecting the digital and the real world change how we consume services?
- How does “sharing” impact business models and how is technology used to enable it? LIVE Singapore is an open platform developed to facilitate the sharing of real-time urban data streams about traffic, tweeting, energy bottlenecks, and even the health of local trees. Where else are we seeing early signs of connected communities?
- There’s a lot of talk about how the “smart city” will improve the delivery of public services, but designing the right business opportunities, models and partnerships is a non-trivial task. What are our insights to date?
- How can we best incubate and commercialize innovation in a multi-stakeholder system like smart infrastructure and smart cities?
- How do we best integrate economic profitability with social equitability?
- As the cost of sensors drops, what new types of sensors and applications are we seeing?
- What lessons have we learned from complex smart grid and infrastructure problems that generate unforeseen 2nd and 3rd order effects?
- What new forms of data visualization for systems-of-systems are in development for communicating increasingly rich and voluminous information?
Keynote speaker: Peter Graf, Chief Sustainability Officer and Executive Vice President of Sustainability Solutions at SAP
Speakers:
Kiara Corrigan, Senior Research Scientist at HP Labs
Sterling Hughes, Head of Advanced Technology, Silver Spring Networks
Gil Perez, SAP Senior Vice President of Sustainable Industries & General Manager Connected Vehicles
Moderator: Olaf J. Groth, CEO, Emerging Frontiers Group LLC
Agenda:
6pm-7pm Registration and Networking Reception
7pm-8:30pm Program
8:30pm-9Pm Networking
Thanks to our speakers, audience and partner organization GABA for a fascinating discussion!
