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How to make the planet smarter?


President BO met business leaders to discuss economy at the White House. Salute him for the due diligence. It is also amazing to see the kind of political connections some of the CEOs have. Try digging Eric Schmidt of Google, for one.

IBM’s premier grabbed the opportunity to introduce his ‘Smarter Planet’ vision to the president, which was to strike it right when the iron is hot. Smarter Planet yeh? For the uninitiated, you know, the planet is very stupid today? Think of the following :

  • Today, distributing power is like transporting a fluid on a perforated pot. 67% of energy is lost in transport.
  • Our medical network… well, its not a network. You can be a HIV positive in one hospital and have a cleaner bill of health according to the records in the second hospital. We call this the ‘multiple versions of the truth’ problem.
  • Our food supply chain is so effective that 48 billion dollar worth of food is wasted just in the US alone. Damn.
  • Our transports… recently my friend spent 18 hours on the roads to the airport on an important capital city where it should normally take 45 minutes.

No doubt, it is an Instrumented and interconnected planet - we have a billion transistors for every human being. Yet, its dumb as a donkey. Check this out to see the big blue’s plans and solutions.

On the flip side, during my travels in the region recently, all I came across are failed IT projects. It almost made me negative to tag the Smarter Planet as just a big poppycock. When its tough to climb a roof, are we dreaming about reaching the skies? So I did some analysis and the conclusions are - its either the idiots implementing IT or its the lack of idiot proof software. And end of it, today, we are still struggling to make our planet operational, let alone smarter.

So what? We will balderdash even bigger! Anyone interested in hearing my vision for the ultimate ‘Smartest Planet’? While smarter is a beauty, smartest is the beauty with big brains (I almost typed boobs) too. Wait until the next post...

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