The Tech Building Blocks of City 2.0

CWmike writes "Sci-Fi writers call it Utopia, the glorious City of the Future. But short of downtown atriums being guarded by invisible walls and flying cars, City 2.0 is not as far off as you may think, writes John Brandon. Ubiquitous wireless networks are already available in Baltimore and Minneapolis, Thomson Reuters has sustainable data centers that sell power back to the local utility, the smart energy grid is well on its way, and city-provided social networks are common. While the concept of City 2.0 is monumental, these key technology advancements are already helping pave the road to the next-generation city. The next steps toward the city of tomorrow are all about integrating these services cohesively, making them widely available across the entire metropolis and managing the services more efficiently. 'The reality is that the city of the future will likely have many aspects of a contained and managed ecosystem,' says analyst Rob Enderle."

Comments

Dumb and dumber.

[khasim]

Yankee Group calls this the Anywhere initiative, which is partly about making mobility in a city infrastructure more flexible, efficient and scalable. In this model, anything can be an end point, including portable gadgets, your vehicle, an office building and your home.

Jeffrey Breen, chief technology officer at the Yankee Group, says that the IP-based, packet-switched cloud model in the enterprise can apply to city infrastructure -- that is, as a vast, interconnected smart grid and social network with widespread and reliable wireless access. Mobile citizens would be a click away from city services.

Imagine it. a quarter million devices connecting to your wireless "cloud".

None of which were spec'ed or validated by you or your group.

Tech support nightmare. Not to mention maintaining all the access points.

This is not "Utopia". This is WiFi. A means of connecting wireless devices (most of them) to services (most of the time).

Re:Can't be Done With Proprietary Stuff

[plover]

Of course it can be done with proprietary gear. That's what the proxy or bridge patterns are for: commonize the interfaces so that Fred's Electric Controllers and Barney's Electric Controllers both have a common ElectricController interface.

Retail did that 15 years ago with the Unified POS device standards. Every barcode scanner out there has a different interface: different commands to turn it on and off, different electrical requirements, etc., but every scanner ultimately does the same task - it reads a barcode. So 15 years ago the retail industry said "we're sick of this" and developed a de facto standard that became UPOS. All a vendor has to do is wrap their device driver in a little proxy layer so it meets the common UPOS interface standard, and any cash register can use it (yes, UPOS today is limited to Windows and Java implementations.)

It doesn't matter if it's a Microsoft WindowsCE electric controller or an Open Source GNU electric controller. As long as the cities arrive at a common interface spec for what a core electric controller does, this can work.