Tag: redmonk

Living PlanIT brings sustainable urbanisation technologies to market

Construction
Photo credit billjacobus1

I had one of the most interesting calls of my RedMonk career last week. It was with Steve Lewis, CEO and co-founder of Living PlanIT (ignore the fact that they are using SilverLight on their homepage – that is prob because of Steve’s Microsoft background).

Living PlanIT are just coming out of stealth and have developed significant IP around sustainable urbanisation. To whit, as Steve explained to me on the call, up until now the construction industry was one of the final hold-outs in the technology revolution. There was very little by way of joined-up processes and consequently massive amounts of waste. Living PlanIT have created a new way of approaching construction projects which is technology led and will vastly reduce construction costs and footprints.

Living PlanIT haven’t just stopped there.

They have signed a letter of Intent with Cisco to work together to build a city in Paredes in northern Portugal on a 17 sq km site which house 225,000 people and will showcase, not just the company’s construction nous but also the city will be a sustainability showcase.

Cisco, as part of the agreement have committed to developing a global innovation center for sensor networks within the new city. They will also integrate tens of millions of sensors with Cisco’s network and computing platforms and integrate to demonstrate Cisco’s Smart+Connected Communities technologies and solutions at urban scale. This will be the ultimate test lab to develop technologies which can be quickly and easily deployed in other urban sustainability projects.

The city itself will run off renewable power and will generate 150% of its electricity needs…

On Open Data, Open Source, UK Libel Law and Evidence-based Sustainability

“When the facts change, I change my mind.  What do you do, sir?” – John Maynard Keynes

As is often the case, someone asks for a written answer to a question, but then fails to use the material. The great thing about blogs is that they make it very easy to make sure such content isn’t wasted. So here are some thoughts on the GreenMonk  mission and sustainability more broadly.

We set up Greenmonk with the explicit intention of lobbying for open data and open source for better environmental outcomes.

Too much of science today has been privatised, or else unhelpfully politicised. Private sector companies hide evidence that doesn’t suit their goals. The right to kill a piece of research is quite common. It happens in the industry analyst sector too- some IT vendors demand the right to kill research they disagree with before signing a contract with a firm. Needless to say RedMonk doesn’t sign up to these contracts.

As we have seen in East Anglia however climate scientists can also massage figures to suit models they’re putting forward. Its not just private firms that have an agenda.

But science should be about open shared peer review of the data, and associated theories. Without open, uncensored science we can’t solve the world’s pressing environmental problems.

In the UK, libel law is regularly abused to shut down dissenting voices. Its not just randy footballers that try and abuse the law. Pushing back against the status quo are organisations such as Sense About Science, which is backing the National Petition for Libel Law Reform.

I just want to make it clear – science needs to be open to peer review, whether privately or publicly funded. Organisations such as the IPCC needs to be about science first, and lobbying second.

So that’s science and open data. What about sharing the source code?

Makers and doers are often “hackers” working on shared problems with shared tools. Homecamp, for example, is a group of people working on home automation to reduce home energy footprints- some of the people in the community work in sustainability related firms such as CurrentCost and pachube but by no means all of them. We need to hack to experiment with this stuff- before it can be packaged and rolled out to the mainstream.

Tim O’Reilly talks about Alpha Geeks as leading edge indicators of the future. Generally they are open source oriented, because they like to get their hands dirty and make things.

The data needs to be open, the source code needs to be open, the barriers to entry need to be lowered – if we are to build a low emissions, low pollution future. Real science is an architecture of participation.

disclosure: Thomas Dolby cover link courtesy of wikipedia.

by-sa

I'm joining RedMonk!

I have been working as a Social Media consultant in Ireland for around four years now and director of the Cork Internet eXchange data center for the last two years.

However with my imminent move to Spain in July, I will lose 90% of the revenue from these streams. I can’t reproduce those streams in the Spanish market because my spoken Spanish is nowhere the level which would be required.

With that in mind I have been actively looking for a job for the last 6-8 months now. I have had some fantastic job offers from some extremely interesting companies.

Recently I have been more and more interested in the Green IT space, writing on my LowerFootprint.com blog and the GreenMonk blog for industry analyst company RedMonk. And giving talks about Green IT at various international conferences.

The other night I watched Al Gore’s latest talk at the TED conference. It is a real call to action and clarified to me that I need to do something.

http://static.videoegg.com/ted2/flash/loader.swf

I have long admired the RedMonk model of open sourcing their (our) analysis and so, when James Governor of RedMonk offered me the opportunity to work professionally for RedMonk doing Green tech and sustainability research I nearly bit his hand off!

So effective immediately I am an Industry Analyst specialising in the Green tech area. Rock on!