This week’s Smart City roundup features the significant growth of the smart building market in the coming years, a $3 billion investment in the Internet of Things (IoT) and a plan to transform Missouri’s I-70 into the first smart interstate.

Smart building market to grow to $17.4B in 2019

A new report from the IDC Energy Insight states that leading organizations around the globe are encouraged to look into the current smart building status and to implement short to medium term plans to capture those benefits. Because of the business values generated by deploying smart building solutions, the market is expected to grow rapidly, projected to grow from $6.3 billion in 2014 to $17.4 billion in 2019, registering a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 22.6 percent. The most aggressive adoption will be in Asia/Pacific, North America, and Western Europe.

“While the ‘Internet of Things’ is a topic of much speculation in the consumer market, smart building technology has steadily been increasing its footprint and impact among commercial buildings. Smart building solutions are valuable technologies for deploying energy management strategies that generate operational efficiencies, cost containment, and sustainability benefits that appeal to key stakeholders in building management,” said Jill Feblowitz, Vice President, IDC Energy Insights.

 .

IBM invest $3B in IoT

IBM has long been a proponent of connecting everything in order to gather data to better understand how things work and how to improve them to make them more efficient, so it’s no surprise that Big Blue announced that it will be investing $3 billion for its new IoT business unit.

“For IBM, this isn’t about hype. It’s about real accomplishments and real opportunities,” wrote IBM’s Stephen Hamm in a blog post. “We have completed thousands of Smarter Planet engagements with clients already, everything from smart grids to smart urban command centers to smart water management. and, today, we’re announcing a new business unit to broaden our reach.”

This investment solidifies IBM’s position as one of the top key IoT players of today and has managed to lure in The Weather Company away from AWS to its own cloud platform.

 .

Engineer wants to transform I-70 into a smart one

Engineer Tim Sylvester is proposing to transform Missouri’s Interstate 70 into a smart highway by embedding sensors on the pavement and turning it into one giant concrete tablet computer. The sensors will not only be able to gather information about the vehicles on the road, but also provide services for them. The smart road can be used to charge electric vehicles as they travel on I-70, or provide information such as icy patches or even accidents.

Sylvester presented the proposal to the Missouri Department of Transportation and though some officials have shown interest in it, but some Missouri residents are wary of the technology since it has yet to be perfected and are concerned about hackers, not to mention how expensive the cost of transforming I-70 into a smart one.

photo credit: Éole via photopin cc