Open source municipalities: twitter, transit and apps a focus of Cities Summit - live blog
This is a live blog from The Cities Summit at the Vancouver Convention Centre, hosted by Mayor Gregor Robertson.
10:22: After big marketing plug for Shaw Communications, Kam Kernahan, Shaw Communications VP talks what's in store, according to Shaw, for City of Vancouver, or cities in general...But first plugs Shaw again.
Has been in business as a communications company for over 40 years, started in Alberta. Grew from small base to become one of Canada's leading media and communications company. Global Television a key part. 18 speciality channels.
Shaw guy is talking about Metro area WiFi. There's a WiFi enabled anything. Devices are becoming WiFi enabled across the board. As long as you're on a WiFi enabled phone, you can connect with a network. That's something that's going to be moving us forward. For the first time smart phones and tablets exceeded the global shipments of laptops and desk tops. Tablets are really exploding. What's interesting with tablets, those tablets really have a good form factor for video viewing. They consume a pile of data and it's causing data to explode. And that's quite exciting.
People are looking for ways to access that data and WiFi is the choice for most. What's interesting recently with COMSCORE, they did a study and looked at iPad, it's now consuming more data on the internet than all of the iPhones. It's causing an explosion of data. Shows a slide that compares the growth of WiFi data over the internet. WiFi will surpass wired internet traffic by 2015. So that's exciting. What's making this possible is more and more devices that make it much easier to connect with a WiFi network. That will allow people to take advantage of more networks that are available. There are more and more things people want to do at that third place where they are, at the wreck centre, or the park or at the beach or on the train, they ant to be able to get access to that network and be able to do whatever they want to do whenever they want to do it. It's going to take a broader and broader network to be able to accommodate that. What are they going to want to be doing?
We can't answer that.
I relate this back to the hold days, I'm not that old but I'm a little old…I relate it back to the days of telephone and you had to worry about when to call your family. That's a think of the past, long distance has become commodified, people use the phone for as long as they ant when they want for no additional cost and it's changed the way people communicate and created a better quality of life for people who want to communicate with their families all around the world.
Why should you worry about how much data you're consuming? It's extremely difficult to figure out track. We think it should be simple to do, essentially free and allowing people to do what they want, when they want it and to find new ways of communicating and being entertained. We think there's a great opportunity here with the Metro area WIFI to change the game.
Through recent tests we've been doing we often exceed the speed of the devices available today.
There is a panel going on now called "Open Cities: The New Imperative."
10:00 - Nenshi: The whole world thinks FB and twitter is one big locker room. It's kind of really beautiful, everybody's becoming so accountable now.
How does this improve the quality of life for citizens. Let me focus on biggest tissues that cities face.
How will this improve the quality of people's lives?
Nenshi: If services are delivered better, I keep using transit as an example because I'm a bit obsessed with transit. If we can get transit to work better. If we can find a way for people to share data so they don't have to cue up for hours …that's a big thing.
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