Smart City - Driving Excellence & Efficiency for Citizen

As the big gambit of information technology and communication moves to include bigger or macro level objectives and application, it is becoming increasingly important to have a broader strategy that can relate to all the stakeholders within a society. This thought has given birth to the concept of Smart Cities.

In today’s technology-oriented scenario, the concept of Smart Cities has already gained tremendous importance and relevance as a means of making available and delivering of ICT enabled services and applications to the citizens, government stakeholders, enterprise customers, and other related authorities that are part of a city’s ecosystem.

The primary objective of Smart City is to look at increasing citizens’ quality of life, and at the same time Smart City also envisions for improving the work efficiency and quality of the applications delivery by governing agencies towards its citizen and business organizations.

And to be able to achieve results within this concept of Smart Cities, one should have a holistic vision and it should be integrated with its present infrastructures, and in all its components.

In today’s scenario, a Smart City will ideally include the following components: developing e-governance driven platforms, relating health with ICT, intelligent transportation systems, development and execution of smart grids and most importantly securing the various stakeholders within the ambit of a city, both physically and electronically as well. And each of these components is put into a different perspective, and taken forward as per the city’s future roadmap, potential challenges etc.

e-governance is one of the most important components in this bigger scheme of smart cities concept, as the development of efficient and effective e-government related platforms and localized applications hold the key to involvement of public masses and hence, take the Smart City from a concept to being a living reality.

Additionally, transnational authentication of citizens and businesses, development and sustenance of frameworks for data privacy are very important. Smart Cities need to be able to integrate themselves into national, regional and international infrastructures that can be monitored and at the same time deliver security at different levels for citizens.

The inclusion and delivery of health for smart cities will play an essential role in increasing the overall standard of living for citizens and ensure that the delivery of health and medicine takes all the required support from the ICT domain.

Concepts like, tele-medicine, e-health, etc surely hold great potential to be able to service the citizens of smart cities. Smart cities will have a convergent perspective on healthcare solutions for their citizens and help in bridging a big gap in between the health and the technological development of ICT.

As the population of big cities is increasing to reach bigger levels, mobility of citizens is surely getting cumbersome. The needs for mobility in bigger cities result into a number of problems, such as traffic congestion and energy (fuel) consumption, which should be addressed by adopting Intelligent Transportation Systems and further adoption of vehicle-tovehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication networks.

Delivering the much needed power to the cities, smart energy grids are the backbone of a Smart City. Today there is a huge requirement to optimize the energy usage and leverage energy consumption between the different stakeholders. Concepts like Automated Metering Infrastructure or AMI are set to take smart grid concept further ahead and deliver intelligence to the energy grids.

Moving forward, the successful combination of smart processes and smart technologies will provide smart energy at the doorsteps of a consumer and also help them to gain on efficiency and savings. Intelligent smart grid systems and integrated communication infrastructure is the need of the hour, which can go a long way in delivering and assisting the management of power distribution grids in an optimized manner.

As a conclusion, though new, the concept of Smart Cities is already catching the eyeballs of the relevant stakeholders and gaining increasingly high importance as a way of enabling all ICT driven services and applications to the citizens, companies and authorities that are part of a city’s ecosystem. Most importantly, the smart city concept aims to increase citizens’ quality of life and improve upon the efficiency & quality of the services provided by governing entities and businesses towards the citizens.

important in aggregation backhaul applications, facilitating the optimization of traffic management over the network, reducing congestion, and helping operators get maximum benefits out of their networking investment.

Coming of Mobile Devices: Security Headaches

With smartphones, tablets becoming common place and BYOD trend picking up, maintaining a tight security on those devices as well as on networks would demand a greater traction. Analyst Ovum claims that smartphones and tablet computers will continue to be deployed by the enterprise for specific roles, particularly for customer-facing staff in service industries.

Imation mobile security claims that the BYOD policy will be popular in the workplace, but at the same time create potential compatibility headaches for the IT department and increase the need for tracking capabilities and usage metrics.

Network security experts believe that 2012 will bring attacks on the Android platform on a small scale, but tablets will be soon targeted by the same malware as that for smartphone platforms. In addition, tablets can draw a special interest from cyber criminals, as people are using them for an increasing number of activities; and they are more likely to store sensitive data on a tab than they have been on a smartphone.

Trend Micro said the real challenge for data center owners will be dealing with the increasing complexities of securing physical, virtual, and cloud based systems. It said that while attacks specifically targeting virtual machines (VMS) and cloud computing services remain a possibility, attackers will find no immediate need to resort to these because conventional targeted attacks will remain effective even in these new environments.

Rise of Smartphones and Tablets

Smarter feature phones and smartphones at sub-usd100 levels would help drive data usage and subscription. New device and client based compression, acceleration, and virtualization technologies will help make the mobile internet access speedier and affordable. For example, a leading handset vendor has come up with a browser client that could compress web pages by up to 90%. Such technologies would make internet access much cheaper for a large number of feature phone users and even act as a pull to bring them into the mobile internet access fold. Chipmakers on their part, too, have already been coming up with hardwarelevel acceleration for internet access. Again, this would help improve quality of experience for the subscribers.

These developments would help drive adoption of data services, including 3G. Content- and screen-aware pricing would also gain significance. Technological innovations are moving at such a breakneck speed that sometimes it becomes difficult for an unassuming consumer to keep up the pace. The latest trend in the device market is the advent of the tablet. And, it has already carved a sizeable market for itself, worldwide as well as in India. Being a true convergence device, tablets have been able to cannibalize the markets for ebook readers, gaming devices, and other media entertainment devices, including the ubiquitous desktops and laptops.

“Looking ahead, in line with our ‘Data Centric: Voice Enabled’ strategy, we at MTS are all set to launch an array of smart devices in 2012 to target the youth segment,” says Leonid Musatov, chief marketing and sales officer, MTS India. He also says that MTS would also be focusing to expand our high-speed data footprint across the country.

The introductory tablets came at a prohibitively high price of around ` 30,000- 40,000. Soon the players, especially the operators, realized that cheaper tablets can be one of the biggest drivers of wireless internet in India. By 2012-13, based on some recent strategic moves made by Reliance and Bharti, we expect tablet prices to go down below 10,000. Though a rage currently, it is unlikely that they will be extensively used as an enterprise solution in the near future; and the entire growth is going to be in the retail space. India has already seen total sales of 158,000 tablets during the nine month (ended June 30, 2011), with 3G and Wi-fi tablets contributing in 70:30 ratio.

Mobile Payment and NFC Services

M-banking enables reaching out to a large section of unbanked population in rural India. Players such as Spice, Oxicash, mchek, ngpay, ICICI’S imobile, etc, are already offering some services in this area, but these are mostly restricted to information service and some basic applications. Bank of India, in association with Nokia and Obopay, has started offering an m-wallet service. However there is plenty of activity on regulatory and industrial front, and we expect m-banking to be a major driver of MVAS market in the near future.

Machine to Machine (M2M) technologies enable devices with same capabilities to communicate directly over wireless

or wired networks. According to a Berg Insight report, the number of cellular network connections worldwide used for M2M communication was 47.7 mn in 2008. It is estimated to grow to 187 mn by 2014. NFC is one of the most promising M2M technologies today. Even though the potential of NFC in applications such as mobile payment, data transfer, e-ticket, access control, etc, is immense, the adoption has been slow with only 5 mn estimated NFC pre-installments worldwide. This is forecasted to grow significantly by 2013, thanks to NFC becoming a standard component in upcoming smartphones.

The mobile payments could become the flagship application for NFC usage. Purchases can be made by only touching your NFC mobile phone to the POS terminal. The mobile in turn can be linked to your credit card, bank account, or online payment services. Another promising application could be in mobile ticketing. With everyone, including Google, Apple, Amazon, etc, showing interest in this space, soon things will surely get heated up.

Mobile Advertising

In 2011, the industry had its share of headline-grabbing news arising out of the 2G scam. However the biggest news for those in the marketing arena was the implementation of a new regulatory regime with respect to the use of mobile for promotions. The new Trai norms of September 2011 have impacted how the marketers and consumers view promotions. And, while we continue to witness an evolution of their interpretation, it’s not an exaggeration to state that the industry will never be the same. As the count of the DND database swells to 150 mn, the new norms have forced service providers and markets to review all businesses operations, which has SMS as a promotional component. In the face of adverse news, it’s useful to remind ourselves that at 75% teledensity levels, mobile is the only mass addressable channel available, and as a result its current share of marketing budgets is extremely underleveraged. Therefore rather than viewing them as deterrents, the new anti-spam regulations should be seen as a catalyst to unlock new thinking and approaches with the target to better engage with the consumers.

2ergo India, a firm in mobile marketing space, says that the Google search accounts for a large portion of the total digital marketing revenues. Since that portion of spend is performance based, it is very resilient to marketing budget cuts. “In 2012, catalyzed by a surge of the Indian mobile internet users, expect

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a significant portion of that budget to migrate to mobile search,” says Raj Singh, managing director, 2ergo India.

One noticeable consequence has been that the marketers have now started to pay closer attention to the mobile web and apps market. The rapid multiplication of the number of mobile web users to an estimated 80 mn has been one of the positive highlights of 2011; and with the proliferation of new handsets into the market, we expect to see that trajectory continue into the new year to the extent that the mobile web user base becomes equivalent to that of the desktop internet.

BYOD: A Sure Trend

BYOD is expected to be a sure trend across the industry and mostly in the ICT industries. It is expected to change the IT procurement. The company PC is becoming a thing of the past, as businesses increasingly allow and even encourage the employees to bring their domestic, consumer devices at their workplace and access corporate applications. Hence will allow application availability at anytime and from anywhere and will help business slash procurement costs. The smartphone/tablet phenomenon will fuel this trend and will drive uptake of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), wireless networking, and end-point security solutions in the corporate arena. However it will create many problems for the IT departments, as they attempt to mitigate risk and signal a tough future for PC and laptop manufacturers.

“Next year, I believe we will see at least one high-profile security disaster as a result of this trend and that will act as a wake-up call for the companies to get proper security processes in place before unlocking their networks to all and sundry,” says Rajesh Kaul, India regional sales director, Brocade.

Without doubt, with innovations expected at all aspects of the ICT industry, 2012 promises to be a year to watch for and the above trends deserves a greater amount of focus.

ritus@cybermedia.co.in