part ii: the power of insightful data

Published in

City as a Service

4 min readJul 25, 2016

What needs to be understood before we can start having serious conversations around better-connected cities is that the data we produce every day has value we can capture.

Recognize: Google and Facebook are among the most successful companies in the world. And how do they continue to profit from millions of users who pay them no money? They are masters at monetizing the data we feed them.

In part i I wrote about the disconnect between modern software companies (e.g. Airbnb, Uber, etc) and the local municipalities that could benefit from having real-time access to their user-generated data. The high-level idea here — the obvious first step as the Internet-of-Things booms beyond our wildest imaginations — is to establish a healthier communications model.

image credit: NCTA — There are already more connected devices than humans.

The data we generate every day can be as beneficial to local government as our tax contributions, but if there continues to be inefficient methodologies and processes to aggregate all of this data; if cities can’t receive, analyze, and act upon all of this data; well then we’re talking $340 billion of waste over the next decade.

What Does A Smart City Look Like In Action?

Let’s pick a random company: Sephora, maker of beauty products. What if an intelligent streetlight system on a sidewalk in Manhattan not only counts how many pedestrians walk by a given location — allowing the lights to smartly turn off and on for maximum energy efficiency — but also tracks the demographics of each person. That’s insight being passively generated into the ecosystem that could now produce a value exchange with Sephora, who would very much like to know that 300,000 people walk down this sidewalk every day and one out of every four are the target demographic.

Now Sephora could make smarter, data-driven decisions on where to open a new location or run targeted Adwords. And what if those same sensors also monitor traffic patterns, so that the transportation department can better deal with traffic flow or public transit issues in Manhattan? The potential is limitless.

You may not know it, but there are already sensors everywhere and a lot of this data is being produced and sold. Uber already knows a whole lot about traffic patterns in NYC as does Waze — it just doesn’t have an effective way to share it (and little incentive).

And modern companies are still communicating their data with city officials by writing up a report and emailing the PDF attachment… i.e. the same way 6th graders send their teacher a report at the end of each quarter is how Airbnb communicates its unfathomable amount of data to municipalities. You wouldn’t believe the amount of inefficiency and uselessness in this process.

Why Don’t We Hear Politicians Talking About Smarter Cities?

There’s a million reasons why most of us don’t understand what the f@!# is going on. The main one being no one is educating the public. There was an article published recently from a major technology publication that gave “4 tips” on how the United States could catch up to other leading smart cities like Singapore and Dubai. Two of their four tips were “start with the end in mind” and “just do it”… hmmm, okay?

An actionable first step is a greater emphasis on service-focused government; one that can send and receive data from the world in real-time and then store and display it in useful ways. We need to begin to automate and standardize these interactions — no more quarterly reports that rely solely on historical data, no more massive inefficiencies — then we will begin to see real progress. Modern companies will be able to hook into an API and immediately begin communicating their data, eliminating the barrier to entry and the long wait times rampant today. Once we get there, companies like Uber and AirBnB could guarantee that they are complying with local governments automatically.

And as an individual contributor, you get to benefit from feeding data to an ecosystem that serves you. Establishing new communications models between the real world and local governments will lead to massively improved services born out of new, actionable insight. This is what it means to have a true symbiotic relationship between technology and ecology, and why we are building Stae.

part ii: the power of insightful data

What Does A Smart City Look Like In Action?

Why Don’t We Hear Politicians Talking About Smarter Cities?

Further Reading

Written by Adam LaGreca