Smart Cities

submitted by Albert Gomez

energymanagertoday.com - August 7, 2013

With commercial building operators facing pressure to reduce energy consumption and IT-based controls and monitoring becoming widespread, a perfect storm of factors has led to new software platforms for building energy management systems (BEMS), says Navigant Research, which predicts that the BEMS market will grow from $1.8 billion to $5.6 billion by 2020.

The Navigant report, Building Energy Management Systems — IT-Based Monitoring and Control Systems for Smart Buildings: Global Market Analysis and Forecasts, says the BEMS market represents one of the fastest-growing and most promising waves of innovation ever to occur in the building industry.

It cites factors such as the increased knowledge and proliferation of digital controls within the building stock in the industry, the high priority focus on energy efficiency among corporations and governments, and the advent of cloud-based data management and Big Data as the reason behind the explosive development of the BEMS market.

submitted by Janine Rees

by Anthony Flint - theatlanticcities.com - March 1, 2012

LONG BEACH – It’s never long at the annual TED conference before attendees feel awash in mind-bending, technology-enabled ideas. This year, it was the theory that there are multiple universes, a robotic drone that is an exact replica of a hummingbird, and a demonstration of the wisdom of the crowd (a request for online guesses from the 5,000-plus attendees of the weight of an ox brought onstage, the average of which was 1,793 pounds. The beast’s weight: 1,795 lbs.).

So it was fitting that the official announcement of the TED Prize 2012, The City 2.0, revealed a kind of global Wikipedia connecting citizens, political leaders, urban experts, companies, and organizations, with the goal of improving the 21st century city using up-to-the-minute crowdsourcing techniques.

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