HorizonWatching

New IBM Commercials Highlight Smarter Planet Issues

IBM has just launched five new TV commercials in conjunction with the US Open tennis tournament. 

The TV commercials support IBM’s strategic Smarter Planet campaign, so there is a little selling going on in the videos.  However, these are important emerging trends, so here you go.

• Cloud – Message:  Workstations used to be tied to a mainframe. Now they're conversing with a cloud.
• Secure Collaboration -  Message:  The choice between being open and being secure isn't a choice anymore. Collaboration is the key to business on a smarter planet, but you need to make sure your business is protected.
• Oil -  Message:   Energy is one of the world's most vital resources.  How we extract, use and preserve this resource is vital to our future.
• Water -  Message:  Water is something we all take for granted, but there is a limited amount in the world. Smarter water management is necessary to ensure our farms, factories and businesses continue to have access to safe, high quality water.
• Public Safety – Message:  Cities all over the world are getting smarter.  By collecting, analyzing and sharing data, your city can be safer, too.

I really like the creative look and feel of these commercials.  I understand there was a bunch of research that went into them.   While I believe the commercials will appeal to the public at large, they are obviously designed to target the IT audience, line of business leaders and CXOs. 

For more on IBM’s Smarter Planet initiative, check out http://www.ibm.com/ibm/ideasfromibm/us/smartplanet/index.shtml

Sensors: Where Do We Need Them The Most?

LinkedIn has an app that allows you to create a quick one question poll.

I am inviting you to participate in an unofficial poll I set up by going to http://polls.linkedin.com/p/54211/uxeza.  The poll takes less than a minute.  It asks you for your opinion on where you feel we need to focus the application of sensors to help make our physical infrastructure more intelligent. 

Sensors are becoming a key part of our physical infrastructure.  We can now embed sensors in physical things, like cars, appliances, medical equipment, cameras, roadways, pipelines, pharmaceuticals or livestock.  We can measure entire ecosystems - whole supply chains, business processes, cities, bridges, buildings, even natural systems like forests and rivers.  With sensors, we will be able to gather huge amounts of real-time information about the state of the world.

So, I have set up a LinkedIn poll to get your feedback.  I am asking you to answer the question:  Where do we need sensors and the related data analytics applied the most? 

Thanks for participating.  Those that answer the question can see the results.

Two Days Left To Enter The Intelligent Use Of Water Competition

Passionate about water conservation and water management issues?

This competition is seeking short films (narrative, documentary, animated, experimental and/or student-made films between 1 and 10 minutes in length) that creatively explore methods and ideas to responsibly manage and use e arth’s most precious resource.

Films submitted by August 15, 2009 will be reviewed by a judging panel of film and water management experts.  Finalists will win a trip to Los Angeles, where they will be guests at a formal screening and awards show hosted at The Getty Center on September 23, 2009.

Check out the website for more information!  www.IUOWFILM.com

Thoughts on Water Management

Though it's a worldwide entity, water is treated as a regional issue.  There is no global market and very little international  exchange.

Addressing environmental challenges will require public-private partnerships.  Consider water, a poorly understood and often wasted and mismanaged resource.  Our global agriculture system wastes an estimated 60% of the 2,500 trillion liters it uses each year. Municipalities lose as much as 50% of their water supply through leaky infrastructure.  And there are nearly 53,000 different water agencies in the U.S. alone, each managing a short stretch of river or a handful of reservoirs.  Despite the fact that water is a shared resource, there’s no coordination of data among these agencies and no holistic view of the entire water ecosystem, or its impact of human activity.  - Source:  Thoughts on Water Management from the Western Governor’s Association.

Water flows through everything - from the air, the land and our own bodies to the global economy.  In fact, every time a good or service is bought or sold, there is a virtual exchange of water.  It takes 700 gallons of water to make a cotton T-shirt; 2,000 gallons to make one gallon of milk; and 10,500 gallons to make a car.  Though the total amount of water on this planet has never changed, the nature of that water is changing.  Everything from where rain falls to the chemical makeup of the oceans is in flux.   And these changes are forcing us to ask some very difficult questions about how and where we live and do business.

As water management issues continue to mount and costs continue to increase, information technology and collaborative innovation will play an instrumental role helping communities, businesses, and governments deal with the tremendous complexity ahead. The combination of volumes of data, the need for mining across different and new data types and the demand for real-time responses requires a new kind of water management intelligence and models that encompasses scalable, statistical algorithms, and massively parallel approaches.

Some links for those of you interested in water management

• IBM Global Innovation Outlook report on water management
• Smarter Water Management website

8 Emerging CleanTech Investment Areas

A new report is claiming that, with an aggressive infrastructure investment, eight emerging technologies could meet 60 % of new energy demand by 2020.  It is also claiming that we could abate more CO2 than is necessary for climate stabilization in just 10 years.  

The report, titled  "The Gigaton Throwdown", was developed with the support of many, many people who are tied to the cleantech industry.  The effort was led, in part, by Sunil Paul, who is a founder of Silicon Valley’s Spring Ventures.

The report estimates that if annual global private investment in cleantech tripled between now and 2020, clean energy investments would be in line with fossil-fuel investments.   It is a lofty goal, but the authors say that if we are able to shift investment into ready cleantech solutions, the results would be world changing:  climate mitigation, energy security and 5 million new jobs planetwide.

The report highlights the eight emerging clean technology solution areas that are ready for investment and could yield the stated goals.

1. Biofuels
2. Building Efficiency
3. Concentrating Solar Power
4. Construction Materials
5. Geothermal
6. Nuclear
7. Solar Photovoltaics
8. Wind

According to the report each of the eight solutions listed above could feasibly deliver one giagaton of global energy, and each could avoid one gigaton of emissions from being discharged into the atmosphere by 2020, thus the idea for the name of the report.

Apparently the authors considered plug-in electric vehicles , but the projected adoption of this technology is predicted to be too slow to have an impact by 2020.

For more information:

• Access the 150 page report via the pdf file "The Gigaton Throwdown"
• Check out the Gigaton website
• Watch this Videos
• Read this Announcement Letter

Looking to 2050: Ten Challenges For The Human Race

Peter Schwartz is recognized internationally as a futurist and strategist.  He honed his skills at Royal Dutch/Shell Group in London, where he led a widely respected scenario planning effort.   He has written a number of interesting books about the future, including The Art of the Long View. 

This past May he gave the commencement address at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.  During the address, he outlined ten longer term challenges for the human race as we look forward to the next 40-50 years.  He encouraged the graduates to come up with innovative solutions to these challenges. 

The top challenges Schwartz outlined are:

1. Creating long-term solutions to meet our energy demands sustainably.
2. Launching a bio-industrial revolution with sustainable manufacturing.
3. Understanding and enhancing the human brain to avert age-related impairments.
4. Improving agriculture to reduce costs and increase its energy and water efficiency.
5. Building sustainable cities through better urban planning and "smart architecture”.
6. Stimulating job growth and economic development.
7. Fusing the technological with the spiritual and aesthetic dimensions of human culture.
8. Advancing technological instruments to drive scientific discovery forward.
9. Harnessing biological tools to advance human evolution.
10. Discovering new ways to lower the costs and environmental impact of space flight and development.  

The list above is an interesting list.  I am not sure that these are the top ten most important challenges, but each of the above ten are certainly important. 

Some comments…

• Energy tops his list and it is hard to argue that it should not be there.  I can’t see the demand for energy going down anytime soon and we need to figure out how to transition to clean energy. 
• Improving agriculture processes in developing nations will have have a significant impact on the economy and quality of life.
• Building smarter and sustainable cities is a very large challenge as the number of megacities grow and grow.
• Number 9 on his list, “Harnessing biological tools to advance human evolution” sounds both scary and beneficial at the same time.
• Regarding number 10, with announced plans to go back to the moon and to Mars, we will need innovative ways to travel through space and live at the destinations we travel to.

It is worth pointing out that many on the list kind of fall under the push for a smarter planet.

If you want to read a transcript of Peter Schwartz’s commencement address, check out http://news.rpi.edu/update.do?artcenterkey=2585

Can you think of any other challenges Schwartz’s list?  The only one that comes to my mind right now is the never ending desire to live in a world free from war and conflict, but I don’t suppose for one minute that that will be solved in the next 40-50 years.

A Primer on Smarter Water

The HorizonWatch Community (this is the internal community at IBM I lead) recently had a conference call on the topic of Water Management trends and issues.  We reviewed the results of the recent IBM Global Innovation Outlook Study on Water and we also reviewed what IBM is doing to provide innovative solutions to our water management issues.   We had two speakers for that call Amy Hermes, from IBM’s Global Innovation Outlook team and Mike Sullivan, from IBM’s Big Green Innovations team.  

This post represents some notes I took from that call along with some additional research I conducted.  For those of you interested in learning about Water Management issues, I hope this is a good introduction and resource for you.

Most of us reading this post take our access to water for granted.  However, I would imagine that we all realize that water is critical to sustaining life on our planet.  Water makes up 60 to 70% by weight of all living organisms and is essential for photosynthesis.  If the Earth’s water supply vanished, there would be no plants, no animals, and no people. 

While the Earth’s water is not vanishing, many scientists believe that our global water supply is in crisis.  We may or may not be at the crisis stage, but we definitely need to take action to solve our water management issues.

Some Quick Facts About Water

• Water covers 75% of the earth's surface.  Nearly 98% of the earth's water is in the oceans.  Fresh water makes up less than 3% of water on earth, over two thirds of this is tied up in polar ice caps and glaciers.  Fresh water lakes and rivers make up only 0.009% of water on Earth and ground water makes up 0.28%.
• It takes 700 gallons of water to make a cotton T-shirt, 2,000 gallons to make one gallon of milk, and 39,000 gallons to make a car.
• Global agriculture wastes an estimated 60% of the 2,500 trillion liters it uses each year. 
• Municipalities lose as much as 50% of their water supply through leaky infrastructure.  
• More than one trillion gallons of water are wasted in U.S. homes each year from easy-to-fix leaks.
• 1 in 5 of the word’s population still lacks access to clean, safe drinking water. 
• The United Nations predicts that nearly half the world’s population will experience critical water shortages by the year 2080.
• There are nearly 53,000 different water agencies in the United States alone, each managing a short stretch of river or a handful of reservoirs. 
• In the last 100 years global water usage has increased at twice the rate of population growth.

For those of us living in developed nations, our water infrastructure is many decades old.  In fact, in some places it is centuries old.  As our demand for water is increasing, we need to modernize the existing infrastructure.  One way to do that is to apply information technology.

Today’s water management systems are operating without enough data and insights.   The planet needs new water management systems, based on smart technology that can collect and analyze real-time data.  These new systems will provide water authorities with the insights they need to supply more water to more people with lower energy-use and cost. 

How Can Technology Help?

What is needed are water management systems that can provide real time collection and analysis of all sources of data.  This includes integrating disparate sensor technologies that produce disparate data formats along with other data from an array of partners.  Information technology solutions are needed that can take data that’s coming in fast and turn it into intelligence that augments the ability to improve decision making about water distribution.  These solutions need to connect the folks in the central control room with those working in the field building bridges, dams, dykes to the sensor experts and sophisticated modelers.

• Technology can monitor, measure and analyze entire water ecosystems, from rivers and reservoirs to the pumps and pipes in our homes.
• The latest water meters, combined with appropriate Water Management solutions can provide a single, reliable, up-to-the minute and actionable view of water use for a government, a business, or a home.   These ‘smart’ water meters can provide real-time insight into water use, raising awareness, locating inefficiencies and decreasing demand.
• Advanced sensors can help us collect all sorts of new data on water usage.  For example, sensors on levees can monitor changing flood conditions and respond accordingly.  Sensor based systems can provide the agriculture industry with detailed information on air quality, soil moisture content and temperature to calculate optimal irrigation schedules.
• Advanced computing, analytics, and simulations can help us all move beyond “real time” to prediction, supporting better-informed policy and management decisions.
• Technology can also be applied to our oceans to gather data on water temperature, currents, wave strength, salinity and marine life, and applying algorithms that can forecast everything from wave patterns over 24 hours to the right time to harvest mussels.

IBM Water Management Solution Areas

IBM is taking a leadership role among technology vendors in researching, piloting and developing a whole suite of water management solutions.  Here is a sample of what  IBM is doing…

• Natural Water Resources – Provides sensor data integration, analysis and visualization to enable the measurement, modeling and management of water levels, usage and quality in natural water resources.
• Water Utilities – Enables water providers to make rapid decisions regarding business processes and operational efficiency to maximize their return on investments as well as foresee and quickly respond to contamination issues and emergencies.
• Water Infrastructure – Provides sensing systems for managing water infrastructure, such as levee oversight management and flood control.
• Water Metering – Improves management of water supply and demand by integrating data between the dozens of stakeholders involved. Provides all stakeholders with consistent, real-time information to help them work together to make critical decisions about water supply in a geographic region.
• Green Sigma for Water™ – is a business consulting service that identifies where water is being used, measures and monitors usage, and creates process improvements to reduce water use. IBM pilots have achieved reductions in water usage of 30%.
• SmartBay Sensor System - Monitors wave conditions, marine life and pollution levels.  Provide real-time information to stakeholders in the Irish maritime economy, runs on a cloud computing platform, and is able to predict water conditions critical to those stakeholders.

Ten Innovative Vendors in the Water Management Industry

The Artemis Project recently announced winners of its first annual Top 50 Water Companies Competition.  The list provides us insights into who the advanced water and water-related technology companies are as this industry is on the verge of becoming one of the great high-growth industries of the 21st Century.

The companies on the list were selected by a panel of experts based on an integrated matrix of four criteria:  technology, intellectual property and know-how, team and market potential.  Here’s the top ten on the Artemis list along with a description of what each company is doing.

1.  AbTech Industries, Inc. (Arizona, USA)  To combat nonpoint source water pollution, AbTech developed the Smart Sponge®, a patented technology that effectively removes pollutants from stormwater.

2.  Oasys Water, Inc. (Massachusetts, USA)  Oasys (Osmotic Application Systems) is a Cambridge MA based company developing a suite of proprietary water treatment products to address the growing global water crisis.  The Company’s Engineered Osmosis (EOTM) technology is a novel treatment platform that can produce clean, potable water at significantly lower cost than current desalination methods.

3.  Seldon Technologies, Inc. (Vermont, USA)  Seldon has developed a new nanostructured material which includes carbon nanotubes: “nanomesh™” that can be produced in large scale and used for purification applications.  This new fused nanomesh material forms the basis for safe, tested and proven products in three major fluid filtration applications: ground water, fuel and air purification.

4.  Emefcy (Caesarea, Israel)  Emefcy’s MEGAWATTER™ platform is a bio-electro-chemical process for electricity and hydrogen production using wastewater as a fuel. This technology addresses an enormous market of industrial wastewater treatment plants in which anaerobic treatment is not applicable, thus expensive-to-operate aerobic treatment is applied.

5.  NanoH2O (California, USA)  NanoH₂O has applied nanotechnology to create advanced membrane materials for desalination and water reuse.  With freshwater scarcity an increasingly worldwide issue, desalination is a vital treatment method to provide freshwater for industrial users and a growing world population from fresh, brackish and seawater sources.  Despite recent advances, desalination remains an expensive source of freshwater because it is energy intensive.  NanoH₂O’s next generation energy-efficient and fouling resistant membranes dramatically improve the baseline economics of desalination and water reuse.

6.  SolarBee, Inc. (North Dakota, USA)  SolarBee, Inc. manufactures and installs solar-powered, long-distance water circulators.  The floating, up-flow circulators can move up to 10,000 gallons per minute from depths of more than 100 feet with a solar-powered pump.  SolarBee’s circulators help solve water-quality problems worldwide in freshwater lakes, wastewater lagoons, storm-water ponds, estuaries, potable and recycled water storage tanks and other reservoirs.

7.  AquaPure (Upper Galilee, Israel)  Aquapure’s mission is to play a pivotal role in the groundwater and municipal treatment industry by offering an ozone-hydrogen peroxide-UV In Situ Advanced Oxidation Process (AOP) water treatment solution, allowing for effective purification of water contaminants.  Aquapure’s technology has provides advanced purification over other existing technologies for a variety wide refractory pollutants characterized by high solubility in water and high toxicity

8.  HydroPoint (California, USA)  HydroPoint is focused on reducing water wasted when used for landscape irrigation.  Proven in 23 independent studies, including the EPA, the WeatherTRAK solution saves water, reduces energy demand and protects water quality while it minimizes liability and expense exposure.  Drawing on information delivered wirelessly from 40,000 weather stations, the WeatherTRAK ET Everywhere service automatically schedules irrigation based on individual landscape needs and local weather conditions.  The result is higher property values, lower water bills and a healthier environment.

9.  MIOX Corporation (New Mexico, USA)  MIOX is focused on applying technology to help solve the need for affordable, safe, and healthy water.  Its patented technology can purify water without dangerous chemicals and enables significant cost and energy savings versus traditional treatment methods.  MIOX technology uses a process referred to as on-site generation (OSG) – the use of salt, water and electricity to produce a powerful chlorine-based disinfectant, “mixed oxidants”, on demand.

10.  ScFi (Cork, Ireland)  ScFi provides a solution to disposing of wet waste (sewage sludge, putrescible waste and other organic materials) safely, quickly and efficiently while minimizing cost.  ScFi’s technology, AquaCritox®, destructs wet waste without the generation of any hazardous waste or emissions and in addition can be a source of renewable energy.

The 10 companies on the list above look like they are positioned well to participate in this growth.

Recommended Next Steps

More work is needed as we transform the water infrastructure to digital technology:

• Continue to Build Awareness for Water Issues.  Many in leadership positions are not aware of the critical need for water management information technology solutions.
• Continue Market Testing & Solutions Platform Development.  Technology vendors need to continue to build assets and test solution platforms.  Stronger linkages are needed across the growing ecosystem.
• Continue to Build Thought Leadership Deliverables.  Tech vendors need to develop content highlighting case studies, references, demonstrations, and white papers.

For More Information

There is a bunch of more reading material available.  Here some links…

• IBM External Links
  • One page brief “Smarter Water for a Smarter Planet”
  • Podcast:  IBM and the Future of Water Management
  • Smarter Water Management Thought Leadership and  Solutions Website  and Water Management Pains Summary Report
  • Global Innovation Outlook Links:  GIO Water website, watch the GIO water videos, or read the GIO Report on Oceans and Water.  For more discussion, check out the GIO Blog.
• Other External Resources
  • Sustainable Asset Management Report - “Water: a market of the future”
  • United Nations:  “Water:  A Shared Responsibility” 
  • World Water Forum “Bridging Divides For Water”
  • Twitter search on water management  http://search.twitter.com/search?q=water+management