Fin24: Smart new ideas

Simon Dingle wrote another good article on Smart Planet that I have copied and linked here.

Smart new ideas
MOST will agree that the human species could be doing things a lot more efficiently and productively. Problems such as water shortages and traffic jams shouldn't exist.

We waste a lot of energy, time and money doing things that should be achievable with less overhead. And we have fantastic technologies that could help with problems, but most of them are focused on military affairs, or turning a buck.

Think beyond day-to-day business and immediate threats, consider the long-term problems we face as a species and the need for cohesive action is clear.

The global downturn has forced us all to take a step back and reassess the way we do things - how we think about work and interaction, and what really matters.

IBM has a new initiative it calls Smart Planet which will underpin all the technology giant's future developments. The idea is that our most fundamental problems can be solved if we work together, combine efforts and share assets.

If we do this, we can converge our technological achievements and ideas to produce solutions greater than the sum of their parts.

'Billions for the better'
IBM spends more money on research and development than any other private company in the world, and will spend $6bn on research and development this year alone. It invented the hard drive, networking and countless other technologies that surround us today.

Now the firm is looking at the bigger picture in terms of global challenges, using its vast resources and ecosystem of partners to solve everything from the most rudimentary and fundamental problems to complex aspirational challenges.

Says Clifford Foster, chief technology officer of IBM South Africa: "Smart Planet is IBM's strategic agenda going forward. It is essentially saying that key drivers are changing the way we see systems needing to be built. Technology can play a role in solving our problems whether it be in healthcare, water provisioning or just about anything else.

"There are three key pillars here. One is in the fact that the world is now digitally aware, with sensors being installed in motor vehicles, waterways and just about everywhere else. The world is also interconnected, and here Africa has a great story to tell with bandwidth projects under way.

"And thirdly, it is about being able to make intelligent decisions based on information provided in near-real time. Smart Planet is about bringing these things together and taking advantage of our instrumented, interconnected and intelligent world," he explains.

Smart marine solutions
An example of a Smart Planet solution can be found in Ireland, where the SmartBay Project has been created to monitor wave conditions, marine life, pollution levels and other factors in and around Galway Bay.

The project uses a kind of electronic buoy to monitor everything from fish in the bay to chemical consistency of the water. The buoys are solar powered, and the data they capture form part of a cohesive system that will be used by everyone from private fisheries to emergency workers and port authorities to monitor the bay in real time.

Foster says the Smart Planet way of thinking is, in part, about sharing infrastructure and systems instead of everyone trying to own and control their own, separated systems.

He uses the example of CCTV cameras installed in cities which can be used to advise on traffic flow, respond to emergencies, control crime and even monitor conditions for road maintenance. The key is in being able to share the actual cameras.

The objects being developed by IBM and its partners to aid the Smart Planet agenda include everything from next-generation circuitry to microscopic membranes used to clean water.

"Using technology to solve our real problems is not something IBM can do by itself. We are working with governments, clients and business partners to make these things happen," says Foster.

There are countless examples of Smart projects aimed at Africa's challenges, but they depend on having governments and other parties on board. Foster says IBM has been welcomed by stakeholders, and that discussions are under way to implement solutions.


The original article can be found here

Working to improve the lives of Africans

I was very impressed with Eric Cantor and his presentation on AppLab.

AppLab, a Grameen Foundation initiative, builds solutions in Africa that enables people to use phones and other mobile devices as to improve their lives and livelihoods.

They have linked up with MTN's Village Phone solution to extend the reach of their offerings beyond the penetration achievable by working with handset owners. For your interest; Village Phone is a solution where an entrepreneur in a village invests in a phone and then resells voice and data, thereby creating a viable business whilst delivering a valuable service to the community. Applab is extending the data aspect of this to deliver additional services that are focussed on alleviating poverty, improving healthcare, improving agricultural yields and providing people with access to market information.

In addition AppLab has been training and supporting local entrepreneurs to serve as information and communication hubs for value-added services. This addresses some of the language and literacy issues that are based when delivery technology-based solutions.

An AppLab application that caught my imagination was a solution that assists farmers in identifying banana diseases and helping them to take corrective action once diagnosed. Where this gets really interesting is that they gather information (GPS and photo) from the farms in the region and then collate this data for the benefit of all farmers. Farmers are then in a better position to understand where this particular disease is spreading and whether they are at risk.

Great stuff!

Safaricom goes Green

Margaret Githiri, Power Systems Manager, at Safaricom was explaining how the unreliable energy grid and high cost of diesel used to fuel generators has driven their move to green energy.

Safaricom are currently powering 115 of their 2000 sites using a hybrid power solution combining wind, solar, batteries and generators. When energy from wind is down they switch to solar and batteries. The batteries can keep the site powered for seven hours before they have to switch to generators (assuming that the wind turbines and solar panels aren’t generating energy by this time).

Safaricom are predicting significant cost savings despite the high initial CAPEX outlay to install this equipment. Maragret has estimated a payback of less than two years and there is the added benefit of reduced Co2 emissions.

Lastly Safaricom have come up with an innovative solution to helping rural mobile users that don’t have access to power to charge their phones. They installed charging booths at their stations where users can charge their phones for a small cost. This has had an additional benefit, and solved another problem, as communities are protecting the base stations themselves. They have seen a significant reduction in diesel theft and damage where this service is provided.

More innovation in Africa! Well done Safaricom.

The Lake Victoria Project - Saving the lives of fishermen

I found out today about the GSMA’s (GSM Association) Development Fund project for Lake Victoria.

GSMA, Zain and Ericsson are in the process of upgrading and extending the existing networks in the Lake Victoria region to provide 30km of mobile coverage around the lake in Uganda, Tanzania and Kenya.

Power is always a challenge in Africa and I understand that the sites are powered by a combination of solar energy and hybrid diesel/battery systems.

The network provides a location-based positioning system that enables emergency authorities to triangulate the mobile signal of fishermen in distress. The GSMA and Zain are working with not-for-profit organisations to establish a rescue coordination service to provide assistance to lake users.

The project is also providing additional value-added-services to users including weather services and real-time market prices, which will help boost the earnings of fisherman as they will be able to find the best prices for their catch.

This is what I mean when I say that “Innovation happens where the need is the greatest”!

Mobile Monday

Mobile Monday’s CEO, Jari Tammisto, explained how their volunteer organisation brings mobile industry visionaries and influencers together to drive cross-border cooperation.

Jari provide some interesting insights in mobile evolution and how young people are driving developments and adoption in mobile. User generated content has made 3G a truly viable technology. Additional services around entertainment, communication and social network are being developed rapidly as a result of this important population grouping.

Regarding advertising; he explained how peer-to-peer is an important addition to traditional marketing with 60-70% of purchasing decisions being based on word-of-mouth.

Jari touched on several other important points, including how network operators need to focus on ensuring that their products are easily understood and easy to pay for, in order to drive consumer retention and intimacy.

More important than these insights to me was learning about the Mobile Monday organization. I am seeing more and more volunteer organizations like these (TED is another great example) nurturing innovation and breaking down the boundaries that exist between stakeholders.

Innovation Excellence at Digital Africa

I enjoyed my first day at the conference.

What struck me is the passion and enthusiasm of the delegates – and the list of delegates is impressive: ministers and ministerial delegates from many African countries (incl Niger, Tanzania, Egypt, Uganda, Ghana, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Sierra Leone, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Zambia, Sudan), CEOs, CIO and CTOs.

I think that the quality and variety of the attending delegates is what makes events like this successful (or not). Whilst I have had the opportunity to present to a broad spectrum of executives from across Africa before, this is the first time that I have had the opportunity to engage with them at such a personal level. I also believe that one of the key differentiators is that this event was not run in South Africa. The mere fact that this event is being held in Uganda has influenced who has attended and given the event a far stronger African feel.

So the first day: I kicked off the Innovation stream with my presentation on Innovation in Africa. The message was simple – transform invention into innovation – using technology to solve some of the really big problems facing us in Africa. This was followed by several others presentations including an insightful view on the need to “Light Africa” by Lynne Gallagher, the CEO of Telecom/Telematique.

The formal day finished with a very interactive panel discussion on regulation, policy setting and standards in the telco industry.

Onto the evening: we were treated to Gala Dinner were I met up with some fellow CTOs. Strangely enough the conversation quickly turned into a discussion on motorbikes when we discovered that we had a shared passion in less conventional means of transport.

All in all … it was a good day.

Bandwidth for Africa

I had a fascinating discussion with WIOCC who are a major shareholder in the EASSy submarine cable. The cable is due for commissioning June next year (approximately a year after the SEACOM cable).

EASSy, like SEACOM, has multiple landing points along the eastern coast, from South Africa to Sudan. Thereafter the cable connects onwards to Europe, the Middle East and the USA.

What impressed me with EASSy is that the network is configured as a two fibre pair collapsed ring. Normally a cable cut between nodes would split the network into two. This wouldn't happen with a collapsed ring architecture as only one would be pruned from the network in the case of a cable cut in shallow water (as the ring integrity is built into the deepwater cables). A deepwater cut would still result into a network split but this is unavoidable as a true ring architecture is not possible due to coastline geography.

It will be interesting to see what effect price competition and regulation will have on end-user consumption. Multiple submarine cables will directly impact wholesale pricing, but consumer pricing will be dependent on the backhaul and “last mile” infrastructure and solutions. The most promising "last mile" solutions are HSDPA and WiMAX. I use WiMAX with great success as it provides an experience very similar to ADSL (ADSL is not available in the area that I live due to lack of available cable).

As WIOCC state in their marketing literature … “Businesses and consumers in east and southern Africa are about to experience a revolution”.

Digital Africa

I am in Uganda at the moment, typing this from my hotel room. My reason for being here? I am attending and presenting at the Digital Africa Summit.

Uganda
Flying into Uganda I was treated to a fantastic African sunset over Lake Victoria. In my opinion there is little in this world to rival the beauty of Africa at dusk.

This is my first time in the country and I had a fascinating journey from Entebbe Airport to the resort on Lake Victoria just outside Kampala. It was dark by the time we go onto the road but it seemed as if the country had just come alive. Every road had been turned into an African market to meet the needs of the Ugandans. The night was awash with people, lights and colours. Business was loud and brisk; from barbers to tailors; from butchers to internet cafes. I can’t wait to compare this experience with Uganda during the day.

The conference
I was enticed to present at this conference as the organisers have focused on “excellence driving positive change”. The theme is upbeat and I am hoping for an energising experience.

Another aspect that interested me is the format – each speaker has 20 minutes to convey their message and there is plenty of time set aside for meetings and networking. I think that the concept will work well as it can be tiresome to listen to hour long presentations all day.

My message
I will be conveying a simple message: Innovating in Africa. My 20 minutes will be spent on conveying the importance of innovation in Africa and why innovation can solve some of the really big problems facing the continent.

I will discuss how inventions in instrumentation, interconnectivity and intelligent decision making can be used to build innovative solutions for Africa. Essentially this means building sense-and-respond systems on a scale never possible before.


Africa is uniquely positioned to leapfrog many of the technologies implemented by developed economies, and to use the emerging technologies and architectures to improve the lives of people living here.

techsmart: Intelligent Society

I enjoyed this article by Thomas Mckinnon on an Intelligent Society published in techsmart.

Interconnections and instruments
Much of his writing (edit: he is referring to Thomas Friedman) concerns the idea of an information society. Wikipedia defines an information society as “a society in which the creation, distribution, diffusion, use, integration and manipulation of information is a significant economic, political, and cultural activity.” The world in which we currently exist exhibits large pockets of this knowledge economy- with the world’s wealthiest states dominating it.

For the development of a knowledge economy we not only need to live in an interconnected world, but also an instrumented world. A world in which every object is a platform for collecting data, from cellphones, to microchipped household appliances and anything else into which we can embed a transistor and from which we can mine data.

To many an instrumented and interconnected world equals an information society.

Intelligence
Last year a number of companies such as Microsoft, Cisco Systems and IBM recognised the fact that it is not enough to live in a world that is just instrumented and interconnected.

IBM’s chief executive, Samuel J. Palmisano, put all the pieces together in a speech delivered on 6 November 2008 that highlighted the need for a more “intelligent” society, what IBM has coined a “Smarter Planet”. Without intelligence, interconnection and instrumentation could actually lead to poor decision making or even indecision- the current global recession being a potential example.

Thus Friedman’s metaphor of a Flat World exhibits some of the same shortcomings the myth of a flat earth displayed when it was debunked around the 3rd century BC (although still a powerful means of conceiving interconnectedness in isolation ). In a world of “1 billion transistors”, “a trillion networked things” and data that is intelligently mined and analysed the world is conspicuously three-dimensional. Thus competitiveness is the sum of interconnectedness, instrumentation and intelligent decision making based on sound data.

South Africa
Clifford Foster, Chief Technology Officer at IBM SA, expressed in an interview with TechSmart the belief that “Africa has an opportunity to leap frog the development process Europe and the developed world had to follow.” The reason for this is that countries with developed infrastructures will have to retrench or re-develop existing infrastructure- at huge costs- while we are currently still developing our infrastructure. He went on to say, “If we act quickly insuring our country and continent is instrumented, that our water supplies have cheap $1 dollar sensors in place, that we develop smart grids etc.- then we are implementing for the future and will become more competitive.”

A demonstrable solution
A demonstrable smart solution in SA is Guateng’s Open Road Tolling System under the auspices of SANRAL. The ORTS seeks to alleviate congestion and to an extent the emission of CO2 (bidding is still underway for the project). By charging drivers rates based on the time of day and area in which they are travelling according to information garnered from RFID tags embedded in vehicles or video captured from gantries and connected to a monitoring system, SANRAL can intelligently manage and monitor traffic.

Thought leadership
While a number of companies seek to offer such solutions IBM believes that it can offer a total solution based on its expertise in hardware, software and sophisticated analytical tools. For the time being however Big Blue sees itself as a thought leader on the issue of an intelligent society by opening up a conversation on smart grids, transportation, health and more issues. While the benefits of an intelligent society speak for themselves for the potential citizens of such a society- resource and maintenance efficiency and cost benefits not the least of which- the benefits for the company that can provide the instruments, connections and ultimately the intelligence (in what may yet be the most unashamed move towards vertical integration in history) are no less obvious.

You can read the original article here.

Metaverses

A social tool?
Currently we think of metaverses like SecondLife as a communication mechanism that allows people to interact and collaborate for pleasure and decision-making. The environment is definitely richer and more engaging than a telephone call or email. Some people would even argue that it has advantages (beyond financial) over communicating in person. This may seem foreign but there is a generation of people that naturally gravitate to this medium.

Other uses
We have used metaverses for a range of communication and collaboration activities with great success. However, it doesn't need to end there. Metaverses are a great tool for learning, simulation, rehearsal and roleplay activities. It provides a tool for developing skills that are difficult or costly to execute in real life. This would probably have to be complemented with real life training and experience in certain situations.

Visualising whats there
This is where is gets really exciting. Imaging visualising the real-world in a metaverse and then using that information to aid decision-making. This could include business processes and manufacturing.

But take this one step further and we can visualise the real-world ... the "internet of things". With more and more of the world's devices becoming smart and connected, there is no reason why we could not represent this information in a metaverse. The ability to manage and manipulate information in three dimensions is exceptionally powerful and natively intuitive.

I can see a not-too-distant-future where we represent energy grids, natural water systems and traffic (amongst others) in metaverses. Consumers, operators and decision-makers will use these tools and information to make better decisions and make them quicker.

Makes good business sense, doesn't it?