Making Kansas City Fertile Ground for the Internet of Things
Kansas City, Missouri Rudy Balasko / Shutterstock.com
With new digital infrastructure downtown, including networked streetlights and sensors, the Living Lab wants to draw more innovators to develop smart services and apps.
The public-private partnership that is helping to line Kansas City, Missouri’s forthcoming 2-mile streetcar route with digital information kiosks is turning its attention to the city’s new Living Lab startup incubator.
Local accelerator Think Big Partners and San Jose, California-based Cisco Systems signed a letter of intent in May 2014 to build the lab devoted to the Internet of Things in the heart of Kansas City’s Downtown Innovation District .
This month, the partnership issued a video call for innovators —people and companies—with smart services and applications to complement planned pilot projects: smart street lighting, smart video surveillance and environment and infrastructure sensing.
“This technology revolution is taking everyday citizen experiences, and its problems, and turning diagnostic data into corrective action that makes a difference,” the narrator says in the video. “This means fewer headaches with lower costs to more effectively run a modern city.”
Kansas City’s new self-monitoring Sensity NetSense streetlights come with theft detection and will save the city an estimated $4 million in energy costs.
Approximately 93,000 streetlights will be networked to improve public safety and limit maintenance.
“Today’s smart streetlight will serve as the foundation for a high-bandwidth, low-latency wireless sensor network that can move large amounts of big data while simultaneously providing Wi-Fi access to citizens and public servants,” the narrator says. “Sensors will be able to alert the streetcar system operator and drivers when a car is blocking the path of an oncoming streetcar.”
The multi-sensor nodes on top of streetlights will help drivers find vacant parking spaces through their phones or car dashboard displays, while in-ground sensors will monitor parking enforcement.
Dumpsters will alert garbage trucks when they’re full and notify them of the quickest route for collection.
And Think Big Partners elaborated on how CityPost kiosks will operate:
Through the captive portal powered by Cisco EMSP Enterprise Mobility Services Platform or EMSP, context aware mobile and kiosk experiences are delivered to citizens by bringing together infrastructure, mobile apps, and cloud services. Urban social apps allow citizens to take ownership of their city by reporting issues on the ground. Thereby creating immediate visibility of administrative problems faced in the city on a daily basis. Using context-aware data and location-based services, EMSP The app opens up the possibility for businesses to promote personalized location based offers to citizens who are in their local vicinity. Through the Cisco Mobile Experience solution, EMSP platform offers businesses analytics and heat maps on their customers based on app activity and social data. Thus giving businesses the ability to reach out to customers who have visited or shown interest in their business.
While just what else the Living Labs has planned is unclear, Kansas City residents will hopefully see some unique emerging Internet of Things technologies and apps being “tested on roads, bridges, buildings and other city assets” in the coming months and years.
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