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Betting on Big Data – Solving the healthcare conundrum 2

Nov

2012

Fire Crackers – The Silent Assassin How many people do you think would get sick during Diwali? To some of us, the question may seem either too-large-to-handle or even irrelevant. There is some implicit presumption that doctors and hospitals that provide health care would be adequate to address any such event. There is also an ...

Managing Ideas – A core discipline for the 21st Century 2

Aug

2012

Reproduced with permission from The New Global Indian (http://newglobalindian.com) From Knowledge to Ideas The discipline of Knowledge Management can perhaps be traced back to the epochal statement of Confucius – “I hear, I forget. I see, I remember. I do, I understand”. For most part of my life translating my learning into knowledge has taken ...

The Anatomy of a Smart City 4

Jun

2012

The deficit in understanding of smart cities There is much interest and conversation around Smart Cities these days. More often than not (as experience has proven) the need for smarter governance in a city is triggered by events that could have been avoided. These events range from major traffic snarls, flooding, epidemic breakouts, devastating fires, ...

Enabling insights for urban infrastructure governance 2

Apr

2012

The need for insights Never before has analytics, transparency and accountability been such hot topics for local governments. Both citizens and legislators are holding city leaders accountable for public spending as well as their performance on citizen services. With depleting budgets city leadership must not only manage their assets and processes better but additionally stand ...

Growing the long tail of smart applications 1

Jan

2012

Is there a case for democratization of smart applications? Cities across the world are vying to be smarter. Ageing infrastructure and spiraling population are jostling with each other in a progressively destructive way. Upping the ante for provisioning of newer and better services is often a futile cry for enabling the change. Public procurement and ...

The long tail of smarter citizens 1

Jan

2012

If the Rio Story penned by Gartner Analyst, Bettina Tratz-Ryan is anything to go by then it appears “signals” are at the heart of any smart city. Signals as defined by Web2.0 guru Tim O’Reilly, was about the use of syndication technology such as RSS to notify users of content changes. Amplify that thought to conceptualize a ...

Does the city know what the city knows? 4

Jan

2012

People are the smart units No one knows more about a city and how it functions than the people who live and work there. Ask the auto-rickshaw driver to take you from one place and the other by the shortest possible route and he will do so without needing a GPRS device. Ask the postman ...

Smarter cities begin with smarter communities 4

Dec

2011

From a privileged few to a participating many An included, involved and participating smart citizen will be at the heart of every smarter city. Demographics if at all provide a very limited view of citizens in any country. At best they are a very approximate snapshot of the recent past. The data collected is ...

May a thousand cities be smart 6

Dec

2011

The promise of the Internet of things This is not a Maosian paraphrase but rather a commentary on a new kind of revolution that is being enabled by the ubiquity of the internet, the ingenuity of people, the intelligence of technologies and the pervasiveness of devices The internet of things is here. Social collaboration is ...

Leveraging the software ecosystem for growth 1

Dec

2011

The growth conundrum From the smallest start-up doing 18 hour days in a garage, to the largest behemoths in the software industry, the need to scale is critical. Growth is the quintessential elixir of any business. Growth drives everything else. And yet time and again, the smaller product companies seem to spend a lot ...

Are you really going to market? 2

Sep

2011

Ask anybody – from the just out of b-school wannabe marketing strategist to “seasoned” pros on the job. Everybody can tell you about the know-how on Go-To-Market Strategy. Very few however know what it takes to execute them. Let me talk about what I am slightly familiar with. Technology Product and service companies. Many of ...