ICF Communities

Building the community of the 21st Century

[intelligentcommunity-blog]

Why Disruption is Harder Than It Looks

[intelligentcommunity-blog]

What’s the Second Act for the World’s First Intelligent Community?

While in Singapore earlier this year, I had the chance to meet with executives of the Infocomm Development Authority, the government agency responsible for that city-state’s information and communications technology. Singapore was named ICF’s very first Intelligent Community of the Year in 1999. So, fifteen years later, what kind of second act has it come up with?

Singapore, if you’re not familiar with it, is an urban nation located on an island at the southern tip of the Malay Penninsula. Since gaining its independence from Malaysia in 1965, it has risen into the top ranks of industrialized nations, with the third-highest per-capita income in the world. That feat is made all the more remarkable by the fact that Singapore’s only natural resources are the ones between its people’s ears. It is one of the top five busiest ports in the world, the fourth biggest financial center, and a production hub that generates 26% of GDP from manufacturing.

Singapore became our first Intelligent Community because of its early success in building a ubiquitous broadband network called Singapore One. They have not been letting the grass grow under their feet since then. Starting in 2010, they set out to become a “Smart Nation” by creating a new national broadband network (NBN) operating at much higher speed and serving as an engine for education, innovation and economic growth.

Their NBN has much in common with Australia’s national project. Both aim for “open access,” meaning a network that stimulates competition rather than entrenches monopoly. The government is the “NetCo,” responsible for building and operating the underlying fiber infrastructure. It licenses “OpCos” or operating companies to run the active transmission systems on the NetCo asset. The nine current OpCos include incumbents like SingTel as well as newer entrants like BlueTel, Tata and StarHub. They sell bandwidth to retail service providers (RSPs), of which there are currently 27, and it is the RSPs that actually deliver services to customers.

By separating the various levels of the network, Singapore’s NBN encourages aggressive competition, which boosts performance, lowers costs and generates new kinds of services. Since January 2012, the NBN has grown subscribers by 45% to 550,000. Singapore’s average download speed leaped 690% to 67 Mbps from the start of NBN services to mid-2013, and average upload speed is right behind it at 53 Mbps. Prices, meanwhile, tend to fall, particularly for packages with speeds of over 200 Mbps.

Best of all, the RSPs are beginning to figure out ways to make money with all that bandwidth. You can sign up for a “Fibre Plan for Gamers” if you need flaming-fast response times to battle intergalactic evil. A student package includes access to a vast database of resources, while a monitoring and surveillance service lets you keep track of your property 24x7. There is even a “Time-Critical Financial Data Services Delivery” that lets individuals and small businesses play on the same field as the flash traders.

At first glance, this may seem just another top-down, government-knows-best kind of project, which so often fails to deliver what it promises. But look closer, and you see Singapore doing what it has done well for five decades: building great infrastructure and creating clear policy rules, so that investors and innovators can get to work. Call it urban and regional planning at its best, and a prime example of the Revolutionary Community at work.

Nobody in the world knows yet what to do with speeds of 100, 200 or 1,000 Mbps at the residential and small business level. To find out, you have to do what Singapore is doing – and a lot of us will be learning from the world’s first Intelligent Community for years to come.

[intelligentcommunity-blog]

[intelligentcommunity-blog]

[intelligentcommunity-blog]

Can You Build an Economy and Save a Life at the Same Time?

In the Intelligent Community of San Francisco (Smart21 of 2007), about 3,000 people work in high-tech manufacturing. The city may be obsessed by software these days, but advanced manufacturing generates about $1 billion in direct and indirect revenue for the local economy.

It also saved a man’s life.

His name is Marc Roth. According to a wonderful article by Jason Shueh in GovTech, Marc was a successful entrepreneur in Las Vegas, where his patented touchscreen technology was used to process taxi fares. Beginning in 2008, however, the financial crisis ran through Las Vegas like a river in flood and took the travel industry – his customers – with it.

In 2010, Marc decided to repair his fortunes by moving to San Francisco. He was sure of landing a good software engineering job earning six figures, and his wife and children would then be able to follow him there.

Instead, he wound up living in his car. Entrepreneurship turns out not always to be a good thing on a resume. Potential employers believed that he would stick around only long enough to line up his next business opportunity.

He worked in a pizza restaurant until nerve damage from long hours on his feet made it impossible for him to do the job, or most other manual labor. One day, his car was robbed and all his possessions stolen. That night, in mental and emotional agony, he checked into a homeless shelter. It felt like the end of the road and he contemplated suicide. But day after day, he decided to put it off for one more sunrise.

On one of those dark days, he found an advertising flyer in a trash can that offered a one-month membership at something called the TechShop. Mark did not know it then but it is the hub of San Francisco’s Maker Movement, which supports community-driven manufacturing design and production. Marc’s flyer got him access to a facility with more than a million dollars in prototyping equipment.

Marc took classes, mastered the equipment, and soon found himself being hired by young entrepreneurs to help with their prototype projects. Then TechShop offered him a teaching position. Months later, a friend, whom he had met at Techshop, paid for him to move into a “hacker hostel” for tech entrepreneurs. Shortly afterward, an investor put money into SF Laser, a laser cutting and etching company that Roth had founded. Eighteen months after he first checked into the homeless shelter, Marc was finally able to bring his family to San Francisco.

Innovation is the lifeblood of the modern economy. Intelligent Communities pursue innovation through a triangular relationship between business, government and such institutions as universities and hospitals. The Innovation Triangle helps keep the economic benefits of innovation local, and creates a culture that engages the entire community in positive change. Maker spaces like TechShop often plan a vital part.

But sometimes, economic lifeblood turns out to be no different than the blood running through a man or woman’s veins. Marc Roth owes his life to TechShop – and in gratitude, he founded a nonprofit called the Learning Shelter, which teaches trades to people as homeless as he once was. San Francisco has gained something even more valuable than another startup – a citizen determined to leave the city better than he found it.