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https://statescoop.com/smart-cities-contemplate-turning-big-data-into-big-money/

Smart cities' contemplate turning big data into big money

Getty Images

Written by Benjamin Freed

APR 3, 2019 | STATESCOOP

“Smart city” initiatives that make use of traffic monitors, environmental sensors and mobile apps have given local governments mountains of new data, and while new information on transportation habits, public health, and air and water conditions raises a host of questions about what cities should do with all of it, there is one potentially lucrative solution: selling it.

Monetizing data generated by new urban technology projects was the topic of an hourlong panel Tuesday at the Smart Cities Connect conference in Denver, where representatives of three local governments and one Sprint executive discussed whether cities can — and should — turn their new data streams into new sources of revenue by selling them to third-party developers in the private sector.

“It’s the people’s data,” said Erik Caldwell, the deputy chief operating officer for San Diego. “It’s on us to keep it that way. That being said, I’m very interested in monetizing the data.”

San Diego — which has a large network of street lights outfitted with internet-connected sensors, and recently announced a collaboration with the U.S. Marine Corps on new smart-city projects — is not selling any of its data right now, Caldwell said, but it is increasingly solicited to do so.

“We’re getting a number of requests so large that it freezes up our system during the day,” he said.

Theresa Gaisser, a traffic engineer with the Transportation Commission of Southern Nevada, said her Las Vegas-area agency is also not currently selling its data, but that “could be a solution down the road.”

Short of selling data that’s currently private to the city government, Caldwell suggested one new revenue stream could come through licensing third parties to create mirrors of San Diego’s open-data portfolio, which includes more than 120 datasets. Such an arrangement, he said, could help ease the high number of requests the city gets through its application programming interface, which software developers use to pull data.

As local governments that maintain open-data platforms deliberate monetizing them, the demand for open data is made obvious given what outside developers have managed to create with municipal data, said Ulysses Vinson, the chief smart communities officer for San Mateo County, California.

“The most amazing thing about open data is that third parties were doing amazing things with it,” Vinson said. “I now take the train and bus because I know what time the trains and bus come. I didn’t before.”

The panelists also said that monetizing city data does not inherently mean putting a paywall around open datasets, but instead charging for uses of the data that go beyond simple browsing.

“The streetlight data, it’s not that valuable by itself,” Caldwell said. “It’s more valuable when you blend it with other things. I think it’s maybe appropriate to charge for it as we add value to the data. I think if developers start using it, we could look at the speed of availability.”

Tim Johnson, a Sprint vice president of the wireless carrier’s “internet of things” business development practice, proposed that monetizing government datasets could potentially replace tax revenue. Johnson said his family was “freaking out” as they moved from Washington state to New Jersey, which has the highest property tax rates in the country.

“What if you at the state and local level take all this data and make it a source of revenue?” he said. “I would far rather know my data is going to some big pool that the leaders of that state are selling to Sprint or other companies and it lowers the real estate tax.”

Johnson compared cities’ potential to sell data to a recent agreement between Germany and Bolivia for the German battery industry to access the South American nation’s lithium reserves.

“You all and others are sitting on a huge deposit,” he said. “There are data brokers out there. It’s a great time to take advantage of that.”

-In this Story-

Big Data, San Diego, San Mateo County, Smart Cities, Smart Cities Connect conference

>>13461204

https://statescoop.com/smart-city-initiatives-are-creating-a-flood-of-new-data/

Smart city initiatives are creating a flood of new data

Written by Benjamin Freed

APR 2, 2019 | STATESCOOP

As local governments continue to apply new layers of technology to their communities as they pursue “smart city” agendas, they face a growing number of questions about what becomes of the data collected by all those new streetlights, traffic monitors, environmental sensors and mobile apps.

During a panel Tuesday morning at the Smart Cities Connect conference in Denver, a group of speakers attempted to parse out all the new complexities of how to handle that information.

“In cities, we’re dealing with really complicated challenges, but one thing that’s common across all of them is management of data,” said Amanda Daflos, Los Angeles’ innovation director. “An additional complication is the ability to share data even across city employees. It’s quite surprising how much we deal with on a daily basis.”

Los Angeles has been aggressive in its use of emerging technologies to fix municipal problems under Mayor Eric Garcetti, who recently joined a consortium of U.S. mayors to exchange smart-city strategies. The city boasts an open-data platform featuring more than 1,100 datasets, and has launched mobile apps like ShakeAlertLA, which attempts to give users early warnings about earthquakes in seismically active Southern California.

The increased collection and sharing of data is also helping officials make street-sweeping and trash collection more routine in neglected parts of Los Angeles, Daflos said. “We used data to see how frequently across the city trash was being picked up or left behind,” she said.

By placing environmental sensors on streets known to be cleaned less frequently, Daflos said her office was able to program the sanitation department to make its cleaning services more even.

But breaking down interagency silos to make municipal service delivery more uniform is just one side of the data glut created by smart-city programs. And the mountains of information, said Jason de Souza, a vice president at the security and communications hardware firm Anixter, will only continue to grow as the devices cities use become more advanced.

“You can install apps on these cameras like you can install apps on your phone,” he said, noting that pole-mounted cameras on street corners can be outfitted with software that reads license plates, among other functions. The volumes of data they collect are now being measured in yottabytes, or about 1 trillion terabytes, he added.

There are also more fundamental challenges as smart-city data continues to bleed into the world, like settling on standardized forms of transmission. Jim Haskins, who leads business development for Cisco’s smart and connected communities practice, said the auto industry is split over whether internet-connected — and potentially autonomous — vehicles should communicate with each other and municipal traffic authorities using 5G cellular technology or digital short-range communication, which uses a radio band to send messages between vehicles and nearby infrastructure.

And even if automakers and researchers can settle their platform disputes, Haskins said connected vehicles will only exacerbate the flood of new data.

“If someone’s transmitting to you 10 times per second from every vehicle, how do you parse that data?” he said.

Cities will also need to address cybersecurity and privacy concerns, Haskins said, and explain to residents and other shareholders how and why their data will be used, while also developing a workforce large and knowledgeable enough to make sense of all that information. Haskins was not alone in that last concern.

“We’re at the point where we’re pouring jet fuel on data science in state and local governments,” said Brian Crow, a vice president at Sensus, a utilities technology firm. “There’s not enough talent that’s coming into this area to move it along.”

-In this Story-

5G, Autonomous Systems, Big Data, connected vehicles, Los Angeles, Smart Cities, workforce

>>13461204

https://statescoop.com/new-mayoral-consultancy-wants-to-help-smart-city-projects-succeed/

New mayoral consultancy wants to help 'smart city' projects succeed

Image: A round table event with mayors and others at Smart City Week NYC, hosted by Ignite Cities. (Ignite Cities)

Written by Colin Wood

JAN 18, 2019 | STATESCOOP

Most “smart cities” projects fall apart before they can deliver on their promises, but a Chicago-based consulting practice announced this week a new consortium of mayoral partnerships that is designed to address that.

Ignite Cities announced on Tuesday the formation of its “Connected City Consulting Practice,” which the company’s CEO, George Burciaga, explained was created out of a need to align the competing interests involved in any urban technology project. By bringing mayors together and identifying common challenges with technology projects, he said, the practice is able to develop a framework that he hopes will yield a higher success rate the next time a city wants to link data about homeless populations with city initiatives or install cameras that help manage downtown traffic congestion.

“Mayors are moving at a much faster rate than I’ve ever seen on this,” said Burgacia, who was previously an Illinois state commissioner for science and technology and executive at Civiq SmartScapes, the company behind the Wi-Fi kiosks found in New York and other cities. “And we want to support the alignment with how fast they’re moving.”

Burgacia told StateScoop he defines “alignment” as helping city leaders reconfigure their institutional structures to avoid failures in municipal technology projects.

A 2015 report from IT advisory firm the Standish Group finds that 19 percent of smart city projects fail outright, while only 29 percent are deemed successful. The rest fizzle out and are forgotten at some stage of the procurement or planning.

“People think the CIO is gun-shy and not moving fast enough,” Burgacia said. “That’s not the case. At least everyone I’ve met, they’re all excited to move technology forward. But the current structure doesn’t allow for a higher success rate.”

Even those who are the most involved and most knowledgeable about smart cities don’t have a great batting average. During a digital government hosted by StateScoop on Tuesday, Rob Lloyd, the CIO of San Jose, California, claimed that his own city’s success rate at moving a project out of its innovation incubator was roughly 30 percent.

Burgacia said he’s seen many projects “flatline very early” across a wide array of city missions, thanks to several different factors.

“We’ll hear about the ‘red tape’ or vendors that are only focused on profit. There are a bunch of different people moving in different directions,” he said.

He said he hopes that will soon change, starting with the information sharing his group of mayors will facilitate, which so far includes Eric Garcetti of Los Angeles, Francis Suarez of Miami, Kirk Caldwell of Honolulu and Stephen K. Benjamin of Columbia, South Carolina. Smaller cities — including Seat Pleasant, Maryland, a Washington, D.C. suburb of about 5,000 — are also involved. Burgacia said the full list of about two dozen participating mayors will be announced in the coming months.

While each city is different, they can still learn from each other quickly, he said. By working with subject matter experts, Burgacia said cities can go from an initial conversation to building lasting and self-sustaining solutions within 60 to 90 days.

“We’re dissecting the conversation at the mayor’s level so we can understand what can be applied that will scale and will replicate,” he said. “We want to develop non-biased ideas and solutions that can support a change in the current root cause, not the symptom.”

-In this Story-

Ignite Cities, Smart Cities

>>13461204

https://statescoop.com/san-diego-and-marines-to-collaborate-on-smart-city-initiatives/

IMAGE:

Recruits with Alpha Company, 1st Recruit Training Battalion, march during a final drill evaluation at Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego, Dec. 22, 2018. (DOD photo / Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Jesula Jeanlouis)

San Diego and Marines to collaborate on 'smart city' initiatives

Recruits with Alpha Company, 1st Recruit Training Battalion, march during a final drill evaluation at Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego, Dec. 22, 2018. (DOD photo / Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Jesula Jeanlouis)

Written by Benjamin Freed

FEB 22, 2019 | STATESCOOP

San Diego officials have announced an agreement with the U.S. Marine Corps to work on “smart city” programs, including the installation of internet-connected streetlights, energy and water initiatives and the testing of unmanned aerial vehicles around the city. Mayor Kevin Faulkner announced the deal Thursday alongside Maj. Gen. Vincent A. Coglianese, the commander of Marine Corps Installations Command.

Under the terms of the memorandum of understanding between San Diego and the Marines, officials from the city and the service branch will meet regularly to “foster collaborations between the parties on ‘smart city’ topics of mutual interest in support of each organizations’ respective goals in the areas of protection, resilience, maintenance, mobility, operational reach and community.”

San Diego and the military are already entwined, with defense-related spending accounting for 20 percent of the city’s gross regional product, including 140,000 uniformed personnel and civilian workers.

“We’re building on the long tradition of collaboration between the U.S. military and the City of San Diego and taking that partnership to the next level for the betterment of the San Diego region,” Faulconer said in a press release. “We will share our experiences, share our discoveries, and share how advanced technology can benefit the people we serve.”

The agreement between San Diego and the Marines references several projects already underway that could be shared between the parties, including renewable-energy and water-conservation projects at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar, which houses 15,000 service members and their families. The projects include installing new solar panel fields and other infrastructure to make the base independent from the surrounding grid and water-reuse equipment.

San Diego officials said the city will contribute to the partnership with some of its own recent initiatives, including the 2017 installation of more than 3,200 internet-connected streetlights outfitted with sensors that collect environmental and transportation data, and a government-backed mobile app launched in 2016 that allows residents to submit neighborhood issues, like potholes, to city hall.

The city and the Marines also said they plan to collaborate on the development of aerial drones. San Diego was one of ten state and local governments chosen last year to participate in a Federal Aviation Administration pilot program to develop drone-use policy.

-In this Story-

San Diego, U.S. Marine Corps

>>13461204

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