Data-driven tech is seeking to tame the urban jungle. Will we like our new life among the sensors? 

Last fall, I met a friend for dinner in downtown San Francisco. He’d driven in, and I hopped into his car on Mission Street amid the tail end of rush hour traffic. He tossed his phone into my lap and told me to find the best parking spot.

On the screen, the SFPark app displayed a map of open parking spots along the street, and color-coded icons showed the pricing and number of spots available in nearby garages. There was a street spot just a block away from the restaurant; we nosed into it and headed inside. I was enthralled.

This! This was the “smart city” we’d been promised! It seemed to me to be a tantalizing glimpse of the future.

A few years ago, we hit a tipping point: as of 2010, more than half of us homo sapiens are city dwellers. We’ve pulled up our roots on the farm and come to cities in droves for the economic and cultural opportunities they offer. And let’s be honest: they’re a little crazy, these urban places we’ve created. This is why I love them — but it’s no wonder that ever since we started moving into cities, we’ve been complaining about them. They’re noisy and chaotic and inefficient and crowded. Conflicts and irritations abound. Parking is terrible.

As long as there have been cities, there have been those who have tried to fix them. In previous decades, the fixers were ecotopians or forward-thinking urban planners, perhaps. But in recent years, the most vocal activists looking to tame the urban jungle are technology companies. Under the banner of the smart city, they’ve introduced a wide range of technologies that promise to change nearly every thread of the urban fabric.

The warp and weft of this new fabric are, of course, data. Lots of it.

The falling price of computing power, the expansion of both wireless and wired broadband data networks, and a plethora of tiny, inexpensive sensors are spinning an endless skein of data. As this data is woven together by public utilities, transit agencies, car makers, app developers, consumer goods companies, home builders, and just about anyone else with a product to offer, we’re promised a future in which the city will be an active participant in our experience, helping make our lives smoother, easier, and more efficient. As a result, we’ll save fuel by the billions of barrels, and road rage will be a thing of the past. We’ll be able to put more renewable energy onto the grid and get credits for recycling our soda bottles.

Or at least that’s the theory.

In practice, we don’t yet know how the smart city will deliver on its promises. And we don’t know what it will be like to live amid this new, active environment that sees our quirky habits as problems to be solved. One premise of such technologies is this: We humans—with our limited information and biased decision-making—have been making a mess of things. With data at the helm, we’ll achieve algorithmic perfection in our urban lives.

Or will we? Today, as we continue to gravitate toward cities — an estimated 70 percent of us by 2050 — there’s growing interest in how to make cities more clean, efficient, accessible, and generally more enjoyable to live in. But is data-driven technology really the answer?

I’m not sure.

Data isn’t a neutral asset. How and what data we collect is shaped by our priorities and our attention. What we do with that data is even more of a human construct. Last month, I attended a robotics conference down at SRI, where I saw a talk on autonomous technology by MIT professor David Mindell. In his presentation, he made the point (and I paraphrase) that autonomous technology isn’t actually free of human intervention. We’ve simply shifted when, and how, we interact with it. Our intentions, assumptions, biases, desires, and preferences (to name a few) are all baked into the sensors, algorithms, and other technology that make these technologies work.

As our “Smart Cities” evolve, we’ll see more and more of the choices we make shaped by the creators and operators of these technologies, rather than our own convictions. If that’s the case, the geeks really will have come to rule the earth — literally, not just metaphorically.

Not worried about data? What about the hardware? Take the case of SFPark: Six months later, the pilot program has ended and the app shows only garages. It’s not because the program wasn’t a success — early results suggest it was — it’s because the 3-year-old sensors in the smart parking meters have run out of battery. Clearly, we have a long way to go before we’ll find our driverless cars headed down the road to utopia.

There’s plenty of room for optimism of course, but I think the smart city is worth some real scrutiny, even from its biggest supporters.

This month, I’m editing the “Smart Cities” issue over at Climate Confidential, where we’re working on a series of stories that look under the hood of the driverless-car revolution, check for skeletons in the closet of the smart home, take the pulse of wearable tech and its applications in the smart city, and visit an unlikely frontier in the smart city revolution: rural towns. We’ll cut away the hype about smart technologies to take a look at what’s happening on the ground and what it will be like to live as a human among the digital infrastructure of the future. If you’re interested in seeing what we find, please join us.

Photo of the Atlanta skyline courtesy Kay Gaensler, via Flickr.

City of Palo Alto Explores a Unique Public-Private Partnership to Inspire Community Solutions.

On one hot day last June, along with civic hacking events in 83 cities participating in the first-ever National Day of Civic Hacking, the City of Palo Alto, California, held an outdoor festival of civic innovation. Approximately 5000 people showed up to discover and be inspired by a wide range of technology-related talks and solutions for delivering government in completely new ways. While some software hacking took place, the focus was on beginning both the education and conversation on defining civic innovation and answering why it is so important to all our communities. The festival was a success and was highly praised by the community and at a special event at the White House later in the summer.

This year, as a follow-up and to coincide with the 2nd National Day of Civic Hacking, the City of Palo Alto decided it was appropriate and timely to move from facilitating the discussion about community-driven civic ideas to helping to provide a platform to build solutions. And from this the Palo Alto Apps Challenge was born.

The motivation to take action

Palo Alto is a small, but notable city just south of San Francisco. It’s the birthplace and heart of Silicon Valley. The city continues to be a place where great ideas emerge and come to fruition. Ideas here change the world. As the local public agency, Palo Alto has both a responsibility to leverage this environment and experiment with delivering services that take advantage of both state-of-the-art technology and local talent. It’s now clear that many other agencies watch us in order to learn what works and what doesn’t; the good and the bad. All of these characteristics form the motivation for the technology-related projects we work on and the partnerships we create.

The Palo Alto Apps Challenge helps to fulfill this responsibility. Through this multi-month, American Idol-style competition, entrants primarily from Palo Alto—but also from surrounding communities–submit app ideas that they hope to build based on the theme of civic engagement. The challenge is managed out of the City Office of the Chief Information Officer (CIO). Other departments assist as appropriate since an initiative such as this requires a wide variety of resources. Funding is largely through sponsors with the City only contributing a small amount for some project management assistance. The challenge is enthusiastically endorsed and supported by both the City Council and City Manager.

How does the challenge work?

The challenge works as follows. Ten finalists are chosen by a panel of judges—all Palo Alto residents with a technical or public policy background—and then the finalists must set about building a working prototype of their idea. Next there is a showcase event where the community is invited to learn about the finalist apps and to provide meaningful feedback. The last event is the grand finale, a televised and Web-streamed show that will highlight the apps and entrants and then elicit the audience and community to vote on their choice for winner using their phones and computers. There will be a 1st, 2nd, and 3rd prizes of $3500, $1000, and $500, respectively. Winners will also be offered free incorporation services should they decide to form a business for their app. Winner retain all rights to their idea and app.

On one level the Palo Alto Apps Challenge is a practical and engaging event that should result in one or more solutions that provide value to the community. But we believe that this challenge is also about a deeper message.

It’s much more than an apps challenge

The future success of the US has much uncertainty. In the last few decades we’ve seen many of the traditional industries in America either disappear or be entirely reinvented. Anyone in the printed press industry knows exactly how this feels. The change is coming about as a result of globalization and massive automation. While many are pessimistic, within this shift is great opportunity. Automation is resulting in a world that is both software and data driven. Because of this, new skills and talent must emerge. As a nation we have to refocus on science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM)—and by the way, art too! Design is no longer an afterthought. The Palo Alto Apps Challenge is one way that one community can help to inspire a new generation of engineers and innovators. We never lose sight of this critical message and motivation.

What happens next?

At the time of writing, the judges had just announced the top 10 finalists. In total, 74 ideas were submitted and 30% of the entrants were under the age of 18. The ideas chosen represented an eclectic variety of solutions. There are ideas for making it easier to find parking spaces; an app for giving a voice to youth on City Council items; an idea that adds gamification to the process of learning about the city; and a solution for crowdsourcing places that have good and poor support for physically challenged individuals. Next up, the 10 finalists will showcase their ideas at a community event at the Palo Alto Art Center.

At the City of Palo Alto we’ve decided it can no longer be business as usual. We recognize it’s not just about apps. It’s so much more. We are pushing the envelope on new thinking across our departments while also ensuring the important and routine work of government gets done.

It’s a whole new day in local government and we are firmly engaged.

For more information on the Palo Alto Apps Challenge, go to http://www.hackpaloalto.org. A version of this article first appeared in the April 2014 edition of Transformations, the Alliance for Innovation newsletter.

Chief Executive Accelerators (CEAs) will pilot the “innovation economy”.

Satya Nadella, Microsoft´s new CEO, sent a clear message on the day of his appointment: “Ours is not an industry that respects tradition - it only respects innovation”.

From the several factors leading to innovation, speed & timing have become the greatest differentiators in the information technology age. Many of the successes we witnessed today are the result of gaining traction at the right speed & moment. New ventures gaining momentum do not flourish in the “office”, they get incubated in the “garage”. The process approach to frame the “garage effect” is known as “acceleration”.

Over the last few years, innovation has left the office and is now “opening soon in an accelerator close to you”.

An accelerator is currently defined as “a structured program, with the purpose of accelerating technology start-ups, characterized by an open application process; offering financing (usually pre seed investment in exchange for a minority stake in the company); with a duration of at least two months and with mentoring as the main value proposition.

While acceleration has become a launchpad for startups, how do corporations bring their new products to the market? Corporations venture ideas, they don´t develop them. Corporations “acqui-hire” talent, they don´t recruit it. Corporations don´t win market share, they buy it. Venturing, funding and acquiring is always faster and (mostly) cheaper. The good news is acceleration can also happen between quarterly reports and certainly within the fiscal year.

This is how Corporate Accelerators are now present in the Telco (Wayra by Telefonica, hub:raum by D-Telekom, Orange Fab by Orange) and Software (Microsoft Ventures, Google for Entrepreneurs) industries. Creative industries have followed soon (Disney Accelerator and Axel Springer Plug & Play) with the support off some of the co-working and acceleration pioneers (TechStars and Plug and Play).

It all started with YCombinator in 2005 when Paul Graham proposed a new model for startup funding that has disrupted venture capital. YCombinator mainly supports digital entrepreneurs, but they have also accelerated boosted boards, a last mile vehicle based on a skateboard with electric power. This shows that accelerators and CEAs are not only for internet business, they offer potential to other sectors: energy (Enel Labs), sports (FuelLab by Nike), pharma (novo ventures) and retail (WalmartLabs).

So, who are the CEAs out there?

The “Natural Born CEA” is Elon Musk. A serial entrepreneur, Musk combines up to three roles in his current ventures (Tesla and SpaceX): CEO, CTO and even Chairman of the Board. A CEA usually embodies different roles. Depending on the industry, the CEA is not only the CEO but also assumes another role that helps the company go faster. Faster than the market, faster than competitors. CEOs try to do their job by taking care of executing on a given mission. CEAs are the main contributors on developing the mission, not only in their deployment. Elon Musk already knew when he finished university that he wanted to concentrate on problems that matter: internet, energy and space.

Marissa Mayer from Yahoo! also fits the profile. The Yahoo! CEA has been fast in taking decisions. In less than 2 years into her new role: she has stopped the products and services that did not seem to work, has spent more than a billion acquiring startups and has already decided to make changes in the leadership team that started with her. All of the above while having her first baby and coming back from maternity leave.

Tien Tzuo, the founder of Zuora - a platform to help tech companies shift to a subscription-based model with automated payments- also has understood how accelerating can disrupt dinosaur players. A former Chief Strategist at salerforce.com, Tzuo got the endorsement of two of the most influentials entrepreneurs in the crm/erp business: Marc Benioff, founder of salesforce.com, and Dave Duffield, founder of PeopleSoft and more recently Workday. Zuora is building its value proposition on the cloud, but has managed to disrupt its industry with a new business model. This is what CEAs do: they change the rules of the game.

Are CEAs born or made? The short answer: they´re still a “work in progress”. However, a whole new generation of talented people are striving to lead their startups differently. They are talented people that have decided not to go the MBA way: they are choosing to join an accelerator to kickstart their projects. Most of the times with a business idea in mind and in the company of future co-founders. If they decide to start their business, they will launch in less than 6 to 9 months, the average time to finish a master. Most of them will not manage to get funding and 75 % of those who get supported will fail before their third business year. Those who do succeed are normally trying it for the second or even third time. They learnt from their past mistakes.

Accepting failure as part of the winning game and trying again (and again) till you finally win is in the DNA of CEAs. The attitude towards failure is what differentiates CEOs from CEAs. CEAs “Dance Like No One Is Watching” says Dave McClure, an entrepreneur disrupting venture capital.

Acceleration is invading Corporations. Accelerators are the corner stone of startups. When will it arrive in Universities? Should it also make it to the schools?

However traditional business tries to defy the odds, the CEA and the disruption they bring to the market is here to stay. CEAs will undoubtedly shape the future. They will pilot our transition to an “innovation economy” where the Silicon Valley spirit travels at rocket speed.

Why the crowd as you know it is changing, and what you can do about it.

Co-written by Daniel Charboneau.

Crowdsourcing is a buzzword that is frequently thrown out by enterprise companies, startups, social business experts & let’s not forget the social media ninjas on Twitter.

It’s been used to come up with new business ideas, solutions to social problems, funding new products , mapping environmental disasters, identifying potholes that need to be repaired and even getting someone to wait in line for your new iPhone.

It seems like everyday there are new products and services being launched that are leveraging the power of the crowd to do something.

So what’s prompting this new collective behavior?

This behavior really is not new, the crowd is simply following the preexisting laws of nature in something called Emergent Behavior. We can observe emergent behavior in everything from ant colonies to the largest of cities. The premise of emergent behavior is that we are all connected through networks (both online & offline) and that we naturally self-organize across our networks to form higher levels of order. Think about what happened with the Arab Spring, Occupy Movement & now the Ukraine. These examples demonstrate that people are self-organizing across their networks and creating change globally.

There a three primary elements fueling this behavior in the digital space:

1. Hyperconnectivity: Our access to the Internet, knowledge-networks and each other is increasing at an astonishing rate. We’re connected through our cell phones, computers, cars & soon-to-be watches.
2. Critical Mass: We’re all at the same party and have reached a tipping point of online connectivity. In fact, 2.4 Billion People use the Internet everyday.
3. Energy: We’re not just consuming information online like we did in the 90s, we’re now collectively doing things, and it’s this collective action that is reverberating across the globe.

So where’s it all headed?

Currently each crowdsourced system is designed around a specific function. Look at the systems below and their current singular use-case.

• Kickstarter = Funding
• Wikipedia = Open Knowledge
• TaskRabbit = Paid Micro-Tasks
• SeeClickFix = Issue Reporting
• Crowdmap = Collective Geographical Mapping

The future is when these systems begin to play together in something we refer to as an open-crowdsourced business process.

You can imagine this process looking like this: (1) An issue is identified; (2) Potential solutions to the problem are developed; (3) The best solution is further developed through micro-tasks by the crowd; (4) The crowd funds the final solution; (5) The solution is implemented using the crowd as a delivery mechanism; (6) The final solution is validated through social media sentiment analysis.

This is just one hypothetical process that can be applied to numerous use-cases.

What you should do about it?

1. Start experimenting with your crowd. If your not doing anything to tap the collective insights of your employees, customers or partners- now’s the time to start. You don’t need expensive software to make use of their collective intelligence, you can start with tools like Facebook, Twitter & Google+.
2. Look at connecting your crowdsourced processes together. If you’re already crowdsourcing processes to your people, start to look at ways you can connect the processes together. If you’re crowdsourcing problem identification from customers with one system and idea generation with another, begin to explore ways to merge these business processes together.
3. Measure, adapt and share your experiences. As you experiment with new ways to enact change with your crowd, make sure you have a way to measure the effectiveness of the tools you’re using and a way to share your experiences with the world. It’s in all of our best interests to share our experiments and what works and what doesn’t so we don’t make the same mistakes.

Over the next few weeks we will be blogging about some crowd-centric strategies.

The Future of Crowdsourcing was originally published in smarter cities on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.