David Meyer of GigaOM reports, “IBM and Deutsche Telekom, the carrier behind the T-Mobile brand, are to work together on creating smart city systems, the companies have announced. The smart city concept, which is closely related to the internet of things, is reliant on pervasive connectivity, drawing on what has traditionally been known as machine-to-machine (M2M) technology to hook up everything from traffic lights to public transport vehicles to the local broadband network. This usually involves the use of cellular networks.” Read more

Jane Wakefield of the BBC reports that Glasgow has been awarded a £24 million grant by the British government to make it one of the UK’s first smart cities. She writes, “[Glasgow] will use the money on projects to demonstrate how a city of the future might work. They will include better services for Glaswegians, with real-time information about traffic and apps to check that buses and trains are on time. The council will also create an app for reporting issues such as potholes and missing bin collections. Other services promised by the council include linking up the CCTV cameras across the city with its traffic management unit in order to identify traffic incidents faster.” Read more

Irene Celino recently shared a presentation on Linking Smart Cities Datasets with Human Computation: the case of UrbanMatch at the eleventh annual ISWC conference in Boston. The description of the presentation states, “To realize the Smart Cities vision, applications can leverage the large availability of open datasets related to urban environments. Those datasets need to be integrated, but it is often hard to automatically achieve a high-quality interlinkage. Human Computation approaches can be employed to solve such a task where machines are ineffective.” Read more

Jane Wakefield of the BBC reports that London plans to test a new “smart city” operating system. She writes, “Living Plan IT has developed its Urban OS to provide a platform to connect services and citizens.  With partners including Hitachi, Phillips and Greenwich council, it aims to use the Greenwich peninsula as a testbed for new technologies running on the system. The OS aims to connect key services such as water, transport, and energy. David Willetts, Minister for Universities and Science, was among the signatories to the partnership. ‘The development of smart cities in future is a crucial commercial opportunity for Britain, and London is the right place to be doing it,’ he said.” Read more