Saturday, March 16, 2019

Smart Cities



Imagining the Smart Cities of 2050
Riding an explosion of sensors, megacity AI ‘brains’, high-speed networks, new materials and breakthrough green solutions, cities are quickly becoming versatile organisms ........ Over the next decade, cities will revolutionize everything about the way we live, travel, eat, work, learn, stay healthy, and even hydrate. ...... the UAE has invested record sums in its Vision 2021 plan, while sub-initiatives like Smart Dubai 2021 charge ahead with AI-geared government services, driverless car networks, and desalination plants. ...... A trailblazer of smart governance, Estonia has leveraged blockchain, AI, and ultra-high connection speeds to build a new generation of technological statecraft. And city states like Singapore have used complex computational models to optimize everything from rainwater capture networks to urban planning, down to the routing of its ocean breeze. ......... today, your car remains an unused asset about 95 percent of the time. ....... Beyond sheer land, a 90 percent driverless car penetration rate could result in $447 billion of projected savings and productivity gains. ....... Cars-as-a-Service (CaaS) business model, urban sprawl will enable the flourishing of megacities on an unprecedented scale. ........ Using Narrowband-IoT (NB-IoT) for low power consumption, Huawei has recently launched a smart parking network in Shanghai that finds nearby parking spots for users on the go, allowing passengers to book and pay via smartphone in record time. ...... 5G networks .... smart rivers that communicate details of environmental pollution, to IoT and AI-geared drones in agriculture. ....... smart city strategies across blockchain, biometrics, AI, and cloud computing. ........ Alibaba plans to embed seamless mobile payments (through AliPay) into the fabric of daily life, as Tencent takes charge of communications and Huawei works on hardware and 5G buildout (not to mention its signature smartphones). ......... One of the most advanced city states on the planet, Singapore joins Dubai in envisioning a future of flying vehicles and optimized airway traffic flow. ....... air rights to flying car structures built above motorways and skyscrapers. ....... your sky courts, your sky gardens, even your private terraces to your condo [become] landing platform[s] for your own personalized drone. ...... one of our greatest priorities becomes smart city governance. ....... In just over 10 years, the UN forecasts that around 43 cities will house over 10 million residents each. ....... Public sector infrastructure and services will soon be hosted on servers, detached from land and physical form. And municipal governments will face the scale of city states, propelled by an upward trend in sovereign urban hubs that run almost entirely on their own. ........ e-Estonia. ....... Hosting every digitizable government function on the cloud, Estonia could run its government almost entirely on a server. ....... Starting in the 1990s, Estonia’s government has covered the nation with ultra-high-speed data connectivity, laying down tremendous amounts of fiber-optic cable. By 2007, citizens could vote from their living rooms. ......... every stage of the legislative process is available to citizens online, including plans for civil engineering projects. ....... Citizens’ healthcare registry is run on the blockchain, allowing patients to own and access their own health data from anywhere in the world—X-rays, digital prescriptions, medical case notes—all the while tracking who has access. ....... i-Voting, civil courts, land registries, banking, taxes, and countless e-facilities allow citizens to access almost any government service with an electronic ID and personal PIN online. ........ perhaps Estonia’s most revolutionary breakthrough is its recently introduced e-citizenship. ....... we’ve seen thriving village startup ecosystems and e-commerce hotbeds take off throughout China’s countryside, resulting in the mass movement and meteoric rise of ‘Taobao Villages.’ ....... Within the next year, Dubai aims to become the first city powered entirely by the blockchain ....... With a similar mind to Dubai, multiple Chinese smart city pilots are quickly following suit........ One of the most resourceful, visionary megacities on the planet, Singapore has embedded advanced computational models and high-tech solutions in everything from urban planning to construction of its housing units. ......... Even in the realm of feeding its citizens, Singapore is fast becoming a champion of vertical farming. It opened the world’s first commercial vertical farm over six years ago, aiming to feed the entire island nation with a fraction of the land use.



Future of Cities Part 2 - Visions of the Future

Future of Smart Cities - Part 1
Each week alone, an estimated 1.3 million people move into cities ...... By 2040, about two-thirds of the world’s population will be concentrated in urban centers. Over the decades ahead, 90 percent of this urban population growth is predicted to flourish across Asia and Africa. ....... As data becomes the gold of the 21st century, centralized databases and hyper-connected infrastructures will enable everything from sentient cities that respond to data inputs in real time, to smart public services that revolutionize modern governance. ....... As 5G connection speeds, IoT-linked devices and sophisticated city AIs give birth to trillion-sensor economies, low latencies will soon allow vehicles to talk to each other and infrastructure systems to self-correct......... China’s Nanjing .... Hangzhou, home to e-commerce giant Alibaba, has now launched a “City Brain” project, aiming to build out one of the most data-responsive cities on the planet. ..... “the City Brain can detect accidents within a second” allowing police to “arrive at [any] site [within] 5 minutes” across an urban area of over 3,000 square miles. ....... Yet aside from self-monitoring cities and urban AI ‘brains,’ what if infrastructure could heal itself on-demand. Forget sensors, connectivity and AI — enter materials science. ....... The U.S. Department of Transportation estimates a $542.6 billion backlog needed for U.S. infrastructure repairs alone.....And as I’ve often said, the world’s most expensive problems are the world’s most profitable opportunities. ........ bio-concrete that can repair its own cracks. ...... Mixed in with calcium lactate, the key ingredients of this novel ‘bio-concrete’ are minute capsules of limestone-producing bacteria distributed throughout any concrete structure. Only when the concrete cracks, letting in air and moisture, does the bacteria awaken. ....... “What makes this limestone-producing bacteria so special is that they are able to survive in concrete for more than 200 years and come into play when the concrete is damaged. ........ The implications of self-healing materials are staggering, offering us resilient structures both on earth and in space........ Some have even posited graphene’s use in the construction of 30 km tall buildings. ........ nano- and micro-materials are ushering in a new era of smart, super-strong and self-charging buildings. ........ Revolutionizing structural flexibility, carbon nanotubes are already dramatically increasing the strength-to-weight ratio of skyscrapers. ...... the creation of commercializable solar power-generating windows. ...... silicon nanoparticles to capture everyday light flowing through our windows. Little solar cells at the edges of windows then harvest this energy for ready use. ..... Leading the pack of China’s 500 smart city pilots, Xiong’an New Area (near Beijing) aims to become a thriving economic zone powered by 100 percent clean electricity.



Thursday, March 07, 2019

Grammarly Productive Person

A Superhuman Invite



Rapportive founder’s new startup Superhuman is what Gmail would be if built today
Beyond Gmail: The new race to reinvent your inbox
Email Productivity with Superhuman
The Superhuman Change To My Current Email Tools
Superhuman
Rahul Vohra
Gaurav Vohra












NYC's Radial Solutions

New York City's solutions are radial. Go a 10-minute hyperloop distance in many directions. Look at this map.





I am talking Middletown, NY, on I84, northwest of the city, where I lived until recently for more than six months. You are looking at Allentown, PA. Also Quakertown, and Doylestown nearby. You are looking at Newtown near Danbury, CT. You are looking at the east end of Long Island, the Hamptons. The rich don't need helicopter rides. Philadelphia itself would be a good candidate, except it falls conveniently on the already proposed Boston-NYC-DC hyperloop corridor.

Specific towns have to be identified that are the right distance and that are politically willing to become sister cities. Less than 10 minutes in hyperloop distance does not make either hyperloop sense or environmental sense.

The idea is also good for the environment. If more than 50% of humanity will congregate in 100 megacities, that will be good for the planet. It will also be good for commerce.

An expanded Penn Station can handle the traffic.

Sunil Madhu: Serial Entrepreneur















Angel.co: Sunil Madhu

Sunil Madhu steps down as Chief Strategy Officer of Socure

Madhu was instrumental in helping Socure develop its proof of concept digital identity platform into a market leading technology.

“All of us at Socure will miss Sunil’s intellect, creativity and guidance, but are excited to see what he will invent next,” said Tom Thimot, CEO of Socure. “Sunil and his team built a world class technology platform that is being used by leaders in financial services and other sectors. Socure will continue to expand on Sunil’s original vision and beyond.” .......... “After building the most accurate AI powered identity verification platform in the world, which has outperformed Google and IBM in head-to-head customer tests, I'm leaving Socure in the capable and experienced hands of my friend and colleague, Tom Thimot and our amazing team,” said Sunil Madhu. “Having helped the company consistently scale its annual revenue by 300% for the past several years, I’m turning my attention to a disruptive new venture." ..... Sunil is a serial entrepreneur, with several successful exits through IPO and acquisition. A security architect by profession, he has spent over 20 years innovating solutions in security and risk management with a focus on identity and access management.


This Blog: January 2011





Wednesday, February 13, 2019

Discovering LinkedIn In 2019

I discovered Twitter in 2009, and JP Rangaswami was a big reason why. His blog Confused Of Calcutta that a friend pointed out to had many posts where he shared his enthusiasm for Twitter. I got infected. Within a year I became a top followed in NYC on Twitter. And I was no Ashton Kutcher. I worked hard at it.

It is not like I had not heard of Twitter. I had. But at first, I thought it was ridiculous. (I was also in attendance at the NY Tech MeetUp where FourSquare first presented, and I was unimpressed with what the two Founders called "check-in") I had been an avid blogger for years. And I thought Twitter was for people who can compose full sentences, but full paragraphs are beyond their reach. I was not going to stoop down.

LinkedIn I signed up for not long after it was launched. I have been a keen reader of tech news since the late 1990s, and so I seldom missed developments. But until this year, I never really used LinkedIn. I updated my profile and kept it current, but that was just because.

This year LinkedIn has become my favorite social network. I have become an avid user. I have been using it for hours a day. It keeps running in the background. It has become more like an Operating System.

When I was living in the city (now I live 90 minutes out, more depending on your mode of transportation) I went to numerous tech events. And often you exchanged business cards. The idea would be to try and connect with those people online.

Now I realize I was doing it in reverse and wasting a lot of precious time. You meet people online. You try to connect with them. They might, they might not reciprocate. Which begs the question, did you have a good enough reason to connect, did you write a relevant enough first email?

After you connect, you can have so much communication online. LinkedIn messaging might not be the best messaging out there, but it works fine. And if you connect with someone enough, you might even want to meet. But that is a rather high threshold. What will you talk in person that you can not over email and voice chat? Especially when a meeting is so hard to arrange. For both parties.

I continue to use Twitter and Facebook, pretty much daily. And although I don't blog as regularly as I used to, my blogs are still active. Now I also blog on LinkedIn itself. But that is deliberately few and far between. If people decide to read my articles, let them be few enough that they might actually read them. That is what I have thought.

The LinkedIn profile is an excellent format. If you have only a few minutes to get to know me, reading my LinkedIn profile might be how you ought to spend your time. The kind of work people have done over the years gives you a pretty good picture of who someone is as a person. Even if your interest in them might not be work-related.

And so I have been networking on LinkedIn like crazy. I don't miss the city. I quite like the clean air around where I live. And I don't much miss the networking tech events either. LinkedIn is far superior an experience.

It feels like for the first time I am building a company (two, actually) in earnest. And LinkedIn is the Operating System I am happily using.

LinkedIn trending topics has also become my favorite place online to go for news. Although I go many places on a daily basis.

And to say I have actually seen Reid Hoffman in person. Mike Bloomberg threw a party. I don't know how I got invited. But that is where I got to meet and know Arianna Huffington also. Hoffman was the featured speaker.