The official home of the President of India is to deploy IBM’s smart city solutions to become a smart township. Tech companies are set to pay growing attention to India’s booming smart city solutions market.
The Rashtrapati Bhavan, the official home of the President of India, located in New Delhi, has announced it is adopting IBM’s smart city solutions. The goal is to transform the self-sustained estate, home to 5,000 residents, into a smart township. An intelligent operations center (IOC) will collect data and turn it into actionable insights, addressing challenges such as water supply, security, electrical infrastructure and solid waste management. ”It offers integrated data visualization, near real-time collaboration and deep analytics to help enhance the ongoing efficiency that will improve the efficiency of services for its residents,” IBM stated.
As part of the ongoing smart township project, IBM will deliver smart city solutions for energy management, water management, waste and horticulture management and security systems. IBM also launched a mobile app that enables residents to report issues to city offices. ”The smart presidential estate is a replicable model which can be replicated in other parts of the country through citizen’s engagement, public and private sector participation and deployment of intensive technologies. We are in the process of replicating our Rashtrapati Bhavan experience of smart township by applying and transferring our knowledge and expertise to five villages in an adjoining state,” said India’s president, Shri Pranab Mukherjee.
India: a strategic smart city market
To cope with rapid urbanization, India will have to partner with tech companies to accelerate the deployment of smart cities. IBM is only one such company aiming for India’s booming smart city market. Another one is Dell, which at the beginning of May announced the launch of a new smart city partner program in India to address the smart city and IoT opportunity in the country.
India’s urbanization is part of a global trend that will see the world’s economic centre of gravity shift from developed to developing economies. Currently, the top 600 cities in the world, consisting mainly of cities in developed countries, are home to a fifth of the world’s population. These generate 60 per cent of global GDP. The amount of wealth created is expected to remain about the same, but a higher proportion will come from cities in China, India and Latin America, a recent report by UN Habitat found. In India alone, 300 million urban residents will be added by 2050, requiring the country to build climate-friendly cities. In China, that figure will reach 350 million.
The global smart city market is set to grow by 14 per cent annually, from $506.8 billion in 2012 to $1.3 trillion in 2019, according to UN Habitat. Investment in smart cities is expected to reach US$41 trillion in the US over the next two decades. In China, smart city investments are expected to exceed US$159 billion in 2015 alone and reach US$320 billion by 2024. With 2.11 billion people in Asia living in urban areas, the region is 48 per cent urbanized and home to 53 per cent of the world’s urban population. We can therefore expect many more tech companies to flock to the region to offer smart city solutions. ”In order to realize the potential of ICT towards sustainable development, an enabling environment has to be created, with participatory governance models, the right infrastructure and technical platforms, including capacity building, ensuring inclusion and bridging the digital divide,” UN Habitat said.
IIoT News Recap: Tesla and Mando enter self-driving partnership; Baidu selects Inspur for autonomous car machine learning; first LoRa-based smart home platform launched; Cevotec takes carbon composite production into industry 4.0; Gas sensors market set to reach $1.01 billion by 2022
Autonomous driving: Tesla said to partner with Mando
Tesla Motors has partnered with Korean parts maker Mando to ”jointly develop key technologies for the automaker’s future autonomous vehicles,” the Korea Herald reports. Mando’s fail-safety technology enables a car to stay in self-driving mode in emergency situations. Mando is reported to have won over Bosch, Continental and TRW. The parts maker has not confirmed the partnership was about autonomous driving saying that ”Although we are in talks, it does not mean that we are working for the automaker’s autonomous vehicles.”
Autonomous driving: Baidu selects Inspur for deep learning
Internet giant Baidu has selected Inspur to provide hardware support to Baidu’s driverless car’s deep learning platform. ”To produce the high-performance computing application, Inspur has launched the NF5568M4 co-processing acceleration server, carrying two Intel E5-2600v3 processors and four Nvidia Tesla K40 GPUs. The highest single computing capacity of a single GPU server reaches 17 teraflops,” said Inspur. Baidu is expected to start producing driverless cars at scale in five years.
LPWAN: KingTing Tech first with LoRa-based smart home platform
KingTing Tech has announced the launch of a LoRa-based product series for the smart home. Released under the YoSmart name, the product suite includes a HUB, a thermostat, a sprinkler and a smart socket for the home.”In comparison with telecommunications technologies including Zigbee and Z-Wave, LoRa has significant advantages in terms of transmission distance and reduced power consumption and is more suitable for smart devices,” King Ting Tech said.
Industry 4.0: Cevotec raises capital to automate carbon composite production
Munich-based startup Cevotec has raised $2 million (€1.75 million) in seed financing to bring industry 4.0 technology to complex carbon composite production. ”Components made from carbon fiber reinforced plastic (CFRP) are high in demand when products need to be light as well as strong. However, production is difficult and requires specialist expertise — many CFRP components are still made by hand to this very day. This is where Cevotec comes in with the Fiber Patch Placement technology, a solution that delivers innovation in process technology, production software, and composite technology. Complex components are built up with patches in an additive, fully automated process,” said High-Tech Gründerfonds, which led the financing round. Other investors include Bayern Kapital and three business angels from the BayStartUP network.
Today’s forecast: Gas sensors market to reach $1.01 billion in revenue by 2022
The global market for gas sensors will be worth $1.01 billion by 2022, growing at a CAGR of 6.22 percent between 2016 and 2022, according to new research by Markets and Markets. ”The major factor driving the gas sensors market across the world is the rising stringent government regulation for occupational safety health of employee working in hazardous industrial environment. The growth of the gas sensors market is also driven by the growing concern for environment pollution control through air quality analysis by detecting the concentration of harmful gases released in environment,” said Markets and Markets. Laser-based gas detection technology is set to grow at the highest rate in the market.
