Smart Cities News from IBM

Miami Dolphins Transform Sun Life Stadium Into an Entertainment Destination for Fans With IBM Solutions for Smarter Cities

IBM's Intelligent Operations Center Helps Miami Dolphins Enhance Game Day Experience

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ARMONK, N.Y. and MIAMI GARDENS. Fla. - 28 Feb 2012: Today, IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced a collaboration with the Miami Dolphins to integrate analytics technology into Sun Life Stadium, enhancing the overall experience for fans of sports, music and media with IBM solutions designed for Smarter Cities.

To view the multimedia assets associated with this release, please clickhttp://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/miami-dolphins-transform-sun-life-stadium-into-an-entertainment-destination-for-fans-with-ibm-solutions-for-smarter-cities-140680853.html  

As a result, officials can gain real immediate insight into all stadium operations including visitor traffic, fan spending preferences and weather patterns, as well as social media sentiment, allowing them to predict and adjust accordingly based on real-time events.  

Sun Life Stadium is a premier venue that hosts a variety of entertainment, media and business events, as well as marquee sports events including the Super Bowl and Orange Bowl. With millions of visitors in over 1.5 million square feet of space, coordinating 24,000 parking spaces and over 75,000 seats can lead to logistical and management challenges for the staff.  

In collaboration with IBM business partner, Flagship Solutions Group, Sun Life Stadium is using IBM's Intelligent Operations Center (IOC) for Smarter Cities, supported on the IBM SmartCloud, to address these challenges while also engaging fans by delivering an unmatched experience at an event. Stadium staff can now offer a unique fan experience by enabling event specialists to more effectively manage visitor traffic, monitor inclement weather and analyze visitor spending habits on concessions, merchandise and dining services to better target the fans with premium products and services.  

IBM's Intelligent Operations Center, which helps manage and view interconnected operations across a city or a stadium, is designed to drive sustainable economic growth by helping organizations deliver more innovative services that exceed their citizens or customers' expectations. 

"Our challenge is to continue to make it exciting for people to come to our stadium as we compete with a constantly morphing entertainment industry that is increasingly interactive," said Tery Howard, Chief Technology Officer, Miami Dolphins, "This collaboration with IBM will provide analytics capabilities to collect insight into massive amounts of data we generate every second to look through the eyes of the fan and develop unmatched services to create meaningful experiences for our visitors."  

IBM's IOC provides Sun Life Stadium a complete interconnected view of stadium activity, from weather alerts, to real-time security, to traffic flow into the stadium creating a seamless flow of visitors attending a game, to insights into whether visitors prefer a full dining experience or buy food at concession stands prior to a big game.   

Real-time analysis also enables staff to predict consumer preferences and plan concession and merchandise needs for current or future events. For example, as concession and dining service sales contribute a significant amount of revenue for a stadium, anticipating a fan's preference for a full dining experience or purchasing food at a concession stand during an event is key to increasing business profitability. Advanced crowd control management with geospatial intelligence and audiovisual notifications, supports security personnel to immediately shift the flow of fans to minimize crowding.  

Reducing inefficiencies and cost requires smarter technologies. With embedded intelligence in the physical assets of an organization, Sun Life Stadium can create a command center to manage not only their data center and IT design, but also their physical assets to manage diverse parts of the facility. Delivered as a cloud computing service, IBM's IOC enables better scalability and aggregates disparate back-end IT systems for a comprehensive view of the organization.  

"Stadiums such as Sun Life are microcosms, akin to cities, with similar requirements for services such as water, energy, transportation, communication and public safety," said Gerry Mooney, GM, IBM Smarter Cities. "IBM is working around the world to make stadiums smarter by infusing intelligent automation that senses and acts to improve conditions including rerouting traffic, predicting overflows, ensuring public safety and preventing outages." 

Enhanced Services for Today's Socially Savvy Mobile Fans  

There is a growing number of sports and entertainment-related social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter to engage fans. IBM is enabling Sun Life Stadium to compete in this increasingly interactive and social entertainment environment to not only engage with fans locally but with fans around the world. Sun Life Stadium is further enhancing the fan experience with new mobile applications for fans to access the latest game scores and stats, and to share images and view videos of games or other events no matter where they are. While still at home, or on the way to the stadium, fans will be able to also receive mobile alerts about the game or an event, including travel and parking instructions, information about the football teams or entertainers and targeted promotions for a concert.  

For more information on IBM Smarter Cities, please visit www.ibm.com/smartercities. 

For more information about cloud offerings from IBM, visit http://www.ibm.com/smartcloud.  Follow us on Twitter at @ibmcloud.

For more information about Sun Life Stadium, visit http://www.sunlifestadium.com/. 

For more information on how Flagship Solutions Group is providing comprehensive technology business solutions to clients in the Mid Market and Enterprise space, visit:http://flagshipsg.com/.

Winter Weather No Match for Biodiesel Blends

From the National Biodiesel Board:

New York City Plows the Way with Biodiesel Blends

The largest municipal user of biodiesel, New York City, even counts on biodiesel blends to power snow removal equipment. The New York City Parks & Recreation Department was the first city agency to pilot biodiesel in 2005 and continues its use of B20.

The 850-vehicle strong diesel fleet helps to maintain more than 29,000 acres in New York City. The fleet includes more than 40 different types of vehicles and equipment – handling everything from snow removal to landscape and parks maintenance to road construction and waste management.

The New York City Sanitation Department also uses biodiesel blends in vehicles used to fight winter weather, such as salt spreaders and plows. "We can't afford for our garbage trucks not to run," said Supervisor of Mechanics Spiro Kattan. "Our trucks don't only pick up garbage, they are also equipped with snowplow hitches. We're a part of the city's snow emergency plans and the residents of New York City would not be too happy if our vehicles went down during a snow storm."

Further, JFK International Airport uses B20 to keep runways clear even in the worst of snowstorms.

Bioheat ® Warms Homes & Offices

In addition, New York City enacted a groundbreaking law requiring that all heating oil sold in the city contain at least 2 percent biodiesel beginning in October 2012. Bioheat® is already keeping many homes and offices warm this winter, including New York City Parks buildings.

For More Information

NBB’s website includes a number of resources about the operability of biodiesel blends in cold climates -- www.biodiesel.org/cold. For more information on Bioheat®, visit: http://www.bioheatonline.com.

(Archived Article) Wind Turbine Projects Run Into Resistance

This post summarizes an interesting New York Times article with the above title that was published on or about September 9, 2010. (When I download an article from my Kindle to my computer, the date recorded is the date of the download, not the date of publication.)

Although this article did not contain many of the numbers that I am so fond of, it still highlighted a problem that does not receive much discussion.  People interested in the proper siting of wind turbines should take note.

BARSTOW, Calif. — The United States military has found a new menace hiding here in the vast emptiness of the Mojave Desert in California: wind turbines.

Moving turbine blades can be indistinguishable from airplanes on many radar systems, and they can even cause blackout zones in which planes disappear from radar entirely.

Clusters of wind turbines, which can reach as high as 400 feet, look very similar to storm activity on weather radar, making it harder for air traffic controllers to give accurate weather information to pilots.

Although the military says no serious incidents have yet occurred because of the interference, the wind turbines pose an unacceptable risk to training, testing and national security in certain regions, Dr. Dorothy Robyn, deputy under secretary of defense, recently told a House Armed Services subcommittee.

Because of its concerns, the Defense Department has emerged as a formidable opponent of wind projects in direct conflict with another branch of the federal government, the Energy Department, which is spending billions of dollars on wind projects as part of President Obama’s broader effort to promote renewable energy.

Eliminating turbine clutter on radar is complicated. Part of the challenge is that many radar systems in use in the United States date back to the 1950s and have outdated processing capabilities — in some cases, less than those of a modern laptop computer.

While there are technology fixes to ease interference on these aging systems, it can be tricky to filter out just the turbines.

On radar, “a wind turbine can look like a 747 on final approach,” said Peter Drake, technical director at Raytheon, a major provider of radar systems. “We don’t want to have the software eliminate a real 747.”

The Energy Department says the problem should be solvable through new technologies.