Mobility Live Conference

Tuesday and Wednesday, I attended the Mobility Live! conference, held at the Woodruff Arts Center in Midtown Atlanta. It was a packed event centered on ideas around mobility, i.e. applications of mobile technology, attended by over 800 people of different backgrounds. The event is in conjunction with GSMA Mobility360 conference and organized by the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce.

As usual, some of my take-aways and thoughts follow.

Smart Cities Opening Keynote

• From Ralph de la Vega, CEO AT&T Mobile+Business Solutions plus figures given by David Christopher, CMO AT&T on day 2: Atlanta will be the most connected city, "Hub/Center for Mobile Innovation." Atlanta has all the conditions to earn those titles:
• Education (Georgia Tech US #7 best public university)
• Entrepreneurship (#3 best city for young entrepreneurs, #4 worldwide for entrepreneurial activity (Forbes) - 700 startups including 200 mobility startups and US #5 for app development intensity)
• Investing companies (#16 city for Fortune companies, #12 for venture capital and big incubators (Forbes)) creating 100k+ jobs in mobile technology.
• From Glenn Lurie, CEO AT&T Mobility: Smart, connected cities make our lives easier, centered around our phones, where simple content is simple and tailored for all ages.
• From Ulf Ewaldsson, CTO Ericsson: Cities have the infrastructure/networks to solve their own problems (e.g. traffic, health, education). Wearables and open APIs will play an important role.
• From Josh Robin, VP Strategy, Masabi: Transit is the first external interaction for people in cities. He brought the ease of retail experience to transit (MBTA pay by phone, 7-month deployment). 

On Connected Cars

• AT&T Drive Studio and Car Tech showcase.
• 60% of cars connected by 2017.
• Audi A3 is the first car with 4G LTE.
• Will existing standards be leveraged for V2V communications?
• $104 BN business (Accenture).
• Safety, security, maintenance, analytics top priority.
• Vocal SMS response, dashboard apps hidden while driving.
• Piloted/autonomous driving: most blocks already available.
• Monetized experience: premium content, destination-based, sponsors, tie to data plans.
• Next big things for cars: health, settings transfer, build your own experience.
• Future ecosystem: insurance, media, regulators, payments.

AT&T Rep demonstrating Audi's central dashboard mobile connectivity.

On Connected Cities

• Connected cities revolve around data, economic development, quality of life.
• A city with good quality of life attracts talent which creates the tools that improve quality of life. It is a virtuous cycle.
• Availability of the Atlanta Pulse (TBA) and Midtown Buzz app (Apple Store) that provides an augmented reality experience in the Midtown Alliance district. 
• Questions to answer: when/how to share data, standards for smart cities/connected vehicles, and political will.

Other Topics

Some quick references to the energy grid, however no session devoted to how energy (e.g. batteries?) is integrated with mobile technology.

Top 5 Trends in Mobility

1. Relationship building at scale - word of mouth is still better than ads. Internet of things becomes internet of people.
2. Video anytime anywhere (beware bandwidth) - More video is watched on mobile devices than TV.
3. Wearables
4. Remote control
5. 2.4M unfilled STEM jobs - must engage kids before high school.

Mobile and Business

• Improve customer focus - Solve business problems with mobility.
• System of engagement vs. system of record.
• Virtual workspaces to work at the speed of life, using Agile/MVP concepts.
• Provide content continuity (how content is displayed) to the consumer. Context awareness when consumer action (e.g. purchase, confirmation) is needed.
• Obstacles: privacy, spectrum, consent.

Wearables

• High privacy concerns but is that a good thing to catch bad behavior?
• Fashion vs. personalization - some gadgets worn for the sake of wearing.
• Immersive but simple to use: little action needed to use the product.
• Ability to hack the device (open hardware or API)
• Wearables for service animals (e.g. to facilitate communication with service animals)

Education, News, and Mobile Technology

• Emotional connection to smartphone.
• 60% of digital traffic is from mobile. Maybe because mobile content is easier to digest. News agencies have mobile story tellers to make content easy for mobile.
• Mobile ad revenue on rise $6.6BN. Monetize local content for mobile devices.
• Content access in developing countries, in one's native language, and for women.
• Mobile technology allows blended/reverse classroom models (listen to class at home, do assignments in class).
• ADA access on educative mobile devices. Mobile should be treated as a different platform from desktop web.
• Content remains key. Customization important. Beware of echo chambers.
• Engaging millenials (convenience, video preference, ability to share).

Physics of Sustainability Lecture

Last week, I attended a presentation by Dr. Littlewood, Director of Argonne National Laboratory, who spoke on the physics of sustainability at a Energy Leader speaker series at Georgia Tech. Dr. Littlewood drew a crowd that packed an auditorium in the recently built Marcus Nanotechnology Building at Georgia Tech. The abstract is shown on the poster below. (No special permission needed for posting slides, according to presenter)

Here are my take-away notes and thoughts:

• All* renewable energy on Earth comes from the Sun... (*geothermal energy too?)
• There is only as much energy per square meter in each country (because of latitude, land available, general climate, hours of sunshine available)
• Renewable energy appears to be efficient, but... can renewables scale for each country?
• A few examples of orders of magnitude:
• Full scale photovoltaic (PV) to supply the entire USA (1TW at 300W/m2) would require covering an area of the size of New Mexico with solar panels (assuming 30% efficiency).
• Like those wind turbines? Fluid dynamics limits the spacing between wind mills and restricts the usable energy density to 6W/m2.
• Hydroelectricity from large water dams provides a 0.3W/m2 annualized.
• IT makes up 12% of all energy usage. CPU speeds are limited by heat.
• I have done a similar scaling exercise at Georgia Tech in the Energy Technology and Policy class, once taught by Prof. Valerie Thomas. Humans need to eat the energy equivalent of one rabbit a day to survive.

• New energy technology should focus on small-scale point-of-use. Efficient batteries and PV. Large power plants and transmission grids as we know them should be treated as an exception. It is quite unlikely that we will come up with an energy system of such large scale.
• Focus should also be on interfaces between energy systems. Examples include heat pump appliances (now underperforming by a factor of 100) and how to transfer energy from one environment to another.
• Energy = money. "The cost of things is their energy input," especially when considering the "payback" time for renewable sources, which the time until the energy produced by the source exceeds the energy needed to build the source. The speaker mentioned cheap solar sources made in certain countries that require inordinate amounts of energy (or pollution).  

Slides of the presentation will be made available at some point. Meanwhile, someone at University of Michigan taped a previous recording of this speech and posted it on YouTube.

Fw: Hack city planning with these DIY street signs

Via Urbanful, walkyourcity.org

Did these people found the holy grail of pop-up city signage? These signs, inked on plastic boards, are just attached to street poles, and it looks very easy to start filling in gaps in public signage. These signs also promote healthy lifestyles by encouraging walking. Read more here, and here is the link to the organization creating this buzz. Signs are already up in Raleigh, NC and Santa Fe, NM.

(photo courtesy Raleigh Public Record)

Fw: Revealing the Hidden World with Shortwave Infrared (SWIR) Imagery

Via Digital Globe.

Check out these pictures of a California wildfire from Digital Globe!

I really like the hotspot visualization and the ability to see through the smoke. Extinguishing fires rapidly is crucial to limit damage, and this infrared visualization will certainly help fire-fighting units focus on areas with the most intense fire.