Partner’s Talk – IBM

Partner’s talk, the place where GreenQ’s friends and colleagues discuss technology, vision, and progress.

This month we had an interesting chat with Michal Levitan Giat, from IBM’s Business Development in Israel.

we challenged her with the most buzzed question lately – What makes a city a smart one?

Her answer was insightful.   

Building a smart city requires a substantial investment to support the city digitization process, then allow absorption and analysis of the torrent of data streaming from sensors and finally to make sense of all the data so that city departments, as well as citizens, can make use of it.

During the last years, we see more and more cities embracing the smart city concept. However, they still need to struggle with current budgets and limitations. Some might think that to make a city smarter; you need to disrupt almost every aspect of how the city operates. But the reality is that cities are going through this transformation all the time, service by service, process by process and system by system.

One of the key areas that have a tremendous effect on our lives and our communities is infrastructure. The way we manage traffic or buildings, the way we distribute electricity or water or the way we manage waste all those are validated areas where having those infrastructures becomes “smart” we’ll see a significant impact on our lives.

One of the examples I like is Waste Management. According to Duke’s Center for Sustainability & Commerce, the average person generates 4.3 pounds waste per day. This fact has a tremendous impact on the authorities who needs to deal with managing the waste process – which streets has met 80% capacity vs. 50%, how many trucks should they send per day per area, etc.

The waste management process has an enormous impact on our lives as an individuals and as a community and society. There are many solutions out there to tackle this mission, but most of them try to replace an existing process by a new one or replace an existing infrastructure by a new one.

The city that never stops… optimizing big data

Those solutions are theoretically right, but not always practical as there are solutions, like GreenQ’s – who lets you modify the service by adding a simple sensor on your infrastructure and saving all your investments in place. A small add-on that has tremendous impact and by that making the city one more step as a smart city.

Michal is the Business Development working with startups at IBM Alpha Zone Accelerator