Smart City Meetup: Lessons Learned from Singapore

Do you live in a smart city?
Do you wish you lived in a smart city?

Every time I venture out here in Silicon Valley, I wish all sorts of data and services were readily available, on demand and in real time. I’d like my water company to tell me I have a leak, my power company to tell me how my systems are doing, my traffic lights to intelligently decide their cycles for traffic.

That is the start of a smart city.

A smart city uses connected devices and sophisticated communications to deliver innovative services, reduce costs for service providers and allow citizens to improve the running of the city. With sensors planted measuring everything from traffic congestion to street lights, from water delivery to bus route and coverage and even energy demand and pollution, a smart city can really meet the demands of the next megatrends in urban needs.

On Oct 13th in San Carlos CA, Solace is sponsoring a meetup, in conjunction with the Internet of Things Developers, a discussion of the Singapore smart city initiative.  Why Singapore? Singapore is at the leading edge of global smart city initiatives and is a good deal of the way along the path to truly transforming the “city nation” for the benefit of its citizens and the redefinition of its government. Everything is on the table for reinvention in Singapore from smart transportation to smart energy to smart buildings to how its citizens receive smarter healthcare.

And Singapore, with the broadest coverage and vision has deep insights into the lesson we all need to learn on how smart cities function, as well as the necessary lessons on IoT deployment and delivery on a truly large scale.

Our meetup, for those of you in the San Francisco Bay Area, will be on October 13th, 2016 at Devil’s Canyon Brewing Company in San Carlos, CA, home of award-winning handcrafted beer, and the very building where Tesla R&D reshaped the auto industry. Our speaker, Sumeet Puri, will present a social and technical perspective on the Singapore smart cities initiative from two viewpoints: his role as an architect of several Singapore smart city projects and as a resident of Singapore living through the transformation of his surroundings. We’ll hear stories on Singapore’s efforts and hear insights into the technical decisions needed to make this happen.

This will be a unique chance for you to learn about what it takes to make a city smart. And maybe we can all work together to help make our own cities smarter.

Update:

On October 13, 2016, Sumeet Puri presented on Singapore’s smart city initiatives from his perspective as both a resident of Singapore, and an architect of some of the smart city services. Over 200 people came out to hear Sumeet’s insights and based on the conversation afterwards, it was very well received. Here are links to watch a recorded version, or see Sumeet’s slides.