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In your opinion does the citizen agree of the idea of smart city, especially the old generations?

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Creating smart cities are said to be the product of government saving costs using IoT. Is this relevant with current situation and what are your opinion?

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Hi guys, let's discuss on how the government saves cost in creating smart cities with IoT.

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Give me some examples how the government implement IoT in our smart city !

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Give me some examples how the government implement IoT in our smart city !

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Is Internet of Things relevant in making smart cities?

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Is Internet of Things relevant in making smart cities?

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The Internet of Things Explained: The Smart Construction Site

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I was wondering,other than these, what are the challenges of using IoT in smart cities

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I was wondering,other than these, what are the challenges of using IoT in smart cities

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Here is a video on what Smart City is all about. Hope you guys have fun watching it while gaining more knowledge!

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Video about smart cities that you can also watch

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Video about smart cities that you can also watch

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Smart Cities: Solving Urban Problems Using Technology

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Smart Cities: Solving Urban Problems Using Technology

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In your opinion, what else matters in building smart cities

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In your opinion, what else matters in building smart cities

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What is a smart city? The answer depends on whom you ask.

Solutions providers will tell you it's smart parking, smart lighting or anything to do with technology. City officials may tell you it's about conducting city business online, such as searching records or applying for permits. City residents may tell you it's the ease of getting around, or about crime reduction.

Everyone is right. A smart city, built properly, will have different value for different stakeholders. They may not even think of their city as a "smart" city. They know it only as a place they want to live in, work in, and be a part of.

Technology is top of mind in the smart city. But it is just one layer of many in the smart city ecosystem. Each layer has a different but equally important role. No one layer is more relevant than another. For example, technology "powers" the smart city, but it is data that leads to insights and new services. However, to create relevant services, cities must be able to innovate the right solutions. To get the right outcomes that matter consistently and at scale, civic leaders must establish sensible technology and data policies. Finally, savvy cities use public private partnerships (PPP) to maximize their resources, go faster and scale effectively.

A new generation of community and technology leaders, managers and solutions providers is needed to build the smart city ecosystem. These architects think broadly and work across layers. They operate in the intersection of technology, innovation, business, operations, strategy and people. This is the "no man's" land where traditional boundaries, processes, policies and rules fail. This is where the hardest problems are. And this is where the real smart city begins.

In building the cities of tomorrow, these smart city ecosystem architects must focus on these eight areas:

1. Break silos and build bridges

A sustainable and well-functioning smart city is a tight orchestration of people, processes, policies and technologies working together across the entire smart city ecosystem. These architects unify teams across municipal departments. They build bridges to connect public and private organizations within the ecosystem. They build consensus to co-create the new city.

2. Focus on outcomes that matter

A smart city is not about technology, but about using technology together with the various ecosystem layers to create the results residents, businesses, municipal organizations and visitors care about. These results, or outcomes, are aligned around the needs of the city - government efficiency, sustainability, health and wellness, mobility, economic development, public safety and quality of life.

3. Engage a broader community of innovators

Within the smart city, innovation and value creation comes not only from municipal agencies, but, from businesses, communities (business districts, "smart" buildings, housing complexes), and individual residents. Smart city ecosystem architects unify the various layers to enable, incentivize, facilitate and scale this larger community to co-create the smart city together.

4. Develop mastery in policymaking and partnerships

Policies and partnerships are the catalysts of the smart city. They augment and amplify limited city resources and capabilities, scale faster, while minimizing risk. Effective smart city ecosystem architects unite the needs of policymakers, technologists and innovators to create sensible policies that create the right outcomes. They proactively seek out public and private collaborators and build sustainable and synergistic partnerships.

5. Enable "city data," not open data

Data is the lifeblood of the smart city. Open data, generated by municipal organizations, is only one source of data. When supplemented with data created by businesses and private citizens, it yields richer insights and better outcomes. Smart city ecosystem architects utilize the full extent of the ecosystem to create "city data". They plan and build data marketplaces, robust data sharing and privacy policies, data analytics skills, and monetization models that facilitate the sourcing and usage of "city data".

6. Manage connectivity as a strategic capability

While connectivity is mission critical, today's smart city ecosystem architects are faced with several challenges - unequal access to basic connectivity, inadequacy of existing services, and a confusing array of emerging LPWAN options. In the smart city, connectivity is not an option nor is it someone else's problem to solve. Smart city architects must lead with new policies and public private partnerships. They must develop new innovative investment strategies, and create new connectivity ecosystems with city owned, service provider owned, and community owned infrastructure.

7. Modernize the infrastructure

Today's smart city infrastructure is a hodge-podge of legacy systems, purpose built departmental technology and smart city point solutions. Cities must modernize their digital infrastructure, while expanding integration to the broader external ecosystem. Cyber-security and technology policies, processes and systems must be revised to be smart city centric, not IT centric. Digital skills, from data analytics, machine learning to software engineering, must be the new competencies of the smart city.

8. Build trust into the smart city

The smart city is only as smart as the trust its stakeholders have in it. Right from the start, smart city architects must design in trust across the entire ecosystem. The technology infrastructure must be secure. Information collected must be protected and used in accordance with its owners' wishes. Policies, legislation and technology must be continuously aligned to maintain the right balance of protection, privacy, transparency, and utility.

Tomorrow's cities are built by smart city ecosystem architects today. To be effective, these architects must expand their perspectives, assume new roles, and work strategically, to build a new sustainable smart city.
This article is published as part of the IDG Contributor Network. Want to Join?

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Building the smart city: 8 things that matter

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What is a smart city? The answer depends on whom you ask. Solutions providers will tell you it's smart parking, smart lighting or anything to do with technology. City officials may tell you it's about conducting city business online, such as searching records or applying for permits.

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Why does smart cities benefits us?

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Will the smart cities reduce cost for the government?

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Hi guys, can any of you give me a better explanation on what Internet of Things is? This is due to I don't really know what it is all about?

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Do you guys really not understand what IoT is? 

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Do you guys really not understand what IoT is? 

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If not, then you can further read it here !

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Imagine a world in which every device in the home, workplace and car are connected. A world where the lights automatically turn on when the car approaches the driveway, the coffee starts brewing when the morning alarm goes off and the front door automatically unlocks when approached by a member of the household, but stays locked when a stranger arrives on the front step. That is the type of world the Internet of Things can create.

Currently, the \"Internet of Things\" is not a second Internet - rather it's a network of devices that are connected to the Internet that is used every day to search Google, upload images and connect with friends. It's a network of products that are connected to the Internet, thus they have their own IP address and can connect to each other to automate simple tasks.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is in its infancy. It has not been fully developed and is fragmented. Luis Galvez, director of the Internet of Things Consortium, a group dedicated to bringing companies together to accelerate the development of the IoT, compares the current state of the IoT to the birth of the computer, noting businesses and consumers are just learning that products can connect to the Internet and now it's time to figure out what to do with the technology.

"The current state of the Internet of Things is very fragmented," Galvez explained. "There are different companies and organizations that are building out their own platforms for either their customers or their individual needs."

Development of the IoT

For the IoT to be fully realized all devices need to be able to connect to each other, regardless of what company manufactured the product or which companies have business relationships with each other.

Here is a case of how the Internet of Things is currently being used: a company called Rest Devices has developed a set of baby pajamas with its Peeko Monitor designed to detect Sudden Infant Death Syndrome; when a baby's respiratory rate reaches alarming levels, the parents receive a text message or phone call, or a call is made to 911. It\'s a very rigid system, controlled completely by the pajama maker. The sensor can\'t communicate with an alarm clock or house lights for additional alerts. In order for that to happen, Rest Devices would have to also manufacture those devices, or work with those that do.

"The true Internet of Things is when the users can simply buy the fire alarms and the baby jammies and as a consumer simply say,' I want to tie those two things together very easily,'" said Chad Jones, vice president of product strategy at Xively, the IoT division of LogMeIn.

In order for that to happen, there needs to be a platform on which the devices can connect directly. Some companies have built their own platforms to connect devices manufactured within a single company, creating closed solutions to solve specific problems, but those closed solutions add to the fragmentation of the growing, and already crowded, industry. In order for all connected devices to communicate with one-another, they all must be connected on the same platform.

The internet provides a great example of the problem. Imagine if all Apple devices had their own specific internet, including sites and services, while Samsung, Asus, and others had their own as well. The results would be far from beneficial, and we would likely not have the robust singular World Wide Web we all enjoy today.

Enter Xively, a cloud platform that serves as a "messaging ridge between devices," which launched worldwide on May 14 after being in beta for nine months. The Xively platform has been integrated into LogMeIn's internal cloud platform called Gravity, which is in 10 data centers around the world and services 255 million users. Companies can then build their products on top of the Xively platform, which allows them to easily connect to any other device on the platform, regardless of which company manufactured it or if those companies have a business relationship. According to Jones, there are objects in over 240 countries connected to the Internet via the Xively platform.

However, more needs to be done for the Internet of Things to be fully realized. Jones says consumers must also be able to discover connected devices, while companies must secure communication, register, control and deactivate, and record data collected by the products.

"Our development path going forward will continue to add functionality that enables even more platforms, that allows you to work with more of the protocols that are out there," Jones said.

Xively is the "Switzerland for communication," Jones said, meaning it supports almost every protocol out there and supports different standards, thus enabling them to interconnect.

The Value of the Internet of Things

The true value of the Internet of Things does not lay in the lights turning on when the car reaches the driveway, but rather the data that the connected devices collect about its users. Imagine a hospital with connected devices. The data collected from those devices outputs information on the status of patients and runs analytics on the various monitoring machine, helping the hospital to run as optimally as possible.

The collection of data from devices will allow consumers, businesses and even entire connected cities to run more efficiently. However, collecting large amounts of data presents challenges.

"Some of the challenges that still need to be figured out are partially around the algorithms that can process the data and give you something valuable out of it," Galvez said. "What are you actually taking out of all this data you are collecting?"

With the collection of data come major privacy and security concerns for consumers. Both Galvez and Jones agree that it's up to the manufacturers of the products to ensure they are protecting user data.

"It's up to the individual companies that are building these products to make sure they're safeguarding their user's information by protecting the data as best they can," Galvez said.

As the platform on which connected products are built, Xively does not have direct access to user data, Jones explained. Xively does not connect with the user because it does not know who the users are. Instead, it's collecting data from the devices and what the devices are sensing, but it can't then connect that information back to any particular user because does not have a user list. For Xively, the product manufacture is its end user, it's the manufacturers whose end user is the consumer and thus up to them to protect individual consumer data.

Despite security concerns, data collection is a key component of the realization of the Internet of Things and is embedded in the end goal of the IoT.

"The goal would be for all these devices to talk to each other and people to have access to this information depending on the value they can device from it," Galvez said.

The value derived from collected data can range from saving a few seconds turning on the lights to saving a baby's life to a huge financial savings for a connected city. Galvez explained that the Internet of Things will allow more information about the world to be gathered, thus allowing users to interact and react to the changing environment and bring about "drastic economic impact."

When it comes to placing a number of the economy of the IoT, different experts have different predictions. Jones said some experts call it $1.2 trillion by 2025, while Cisco estimates the industry to reach $14.4 trillion in the same time frame.

Jones simple estimated "the economic potential of this type of environment is something that is going to dwarf the Internet and mobile combined."

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What is the Internet of Things and Why is it Important? - TechnologyGuide.com

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Imagine a world in which every device in the home, workplace and car are connected. A world where the lights automatically turn on when the car approaches the driveway, the coffee starts brewing when the morning alarm goes off and the front door automatically unlocks when approached by a member of the household, but stays locked when a stranger arrives on the front step.