By Nnamdi Odumody

A Smart City is a city in which technology is a driving force in provision of smart services to its citizens. According to Mckinsey Global Institute, by 2025, cities will save up to $1.7 trillion a year delivering services if they deploy new digital systems on a large scale. As part of hosting the 1992 Summer Olympics, the city of Barcelona which is the capital of Catalonia in North Eastern Spain converted its abandoned textile district into a technology hub called @22 which is now home to dozens of startups, and laid a network of fiber optic cables which covers 310 square miles.

Twenty seven years later, it is Europe’s and the world’s most wired city. With an operating system that runs the entire city within one interface in place, different applications aimed at making the lives of its 2 million residents happier, it saves $58 million annually through Connected Water management, $37 million from Connected Street Lighting Solutions, reducing costs by one third.

According to Cisco, Barcelona will see cumulative economic benefits of 832 million euros by 2025, including 86.4 million euros in extra tourist spending. Its #1 tourist attraction, Camp Nou which is the homeground of FC Barcelona new stadium, will offer new revenue streams by linking fans directly to merchandising with free Wi-fi. It will also remove the fences around its 54 acre compound that attracts about 1.7 million tourists annually, creating a smart city neighborhood in the middle of Barcelona.

The Emirate of Dubai launched its Smart Dubai Initiative to make it the world’s smartest city by 2021. Between 2014 and 2017, Dubai launched 137 Smart Initiatives and 1, 129 Smart Services with 307,105 total downloads. It’s AVG happiness index in 2016 was 90 percent  with 30,123 questions asked in three months and 11 billion AE Dirham transactions same year.

The Government of Dubai between 2003 and 2015 saved $1.2 billion through smart services with $5.6 saved by them for every $1 spent on Smart Transformation. It’s potential value from IoT (Internet of Things) is $4.8 billion by 2020, $1.5 billion potential value at stake from government blockchain by 2020, $2.9 billion potential gross value added to GDP from Open and Shared City Data annually starting from 2021 (i.e $1,000 value per person in the city) while 100 percent Dubai government transactions will be on the blockchain by 2020. Dubai’s government will celebrate its last paper transaction by 2021.

The Smart Nation Singapore is the national effort of the government to remake the city state and its about 5 million citizens to embrace technology to make their daily lives easier, irrespective of age, gender, race and religion. It’s CODEX (Core Operations Development Environment and Exchange) is the digital platform that will enable the government to deliver better digital services to citizens faster and more cost efficiently. Its benefits:

• Reusable digital components including machine readable data flows, middleware and micro services will be shared across agencies so that developers can plug and play into these resources and focus their time and energy on building better products to serve the public better.
• The adoption of common tools and standards within government and by vendors will reduce bugs and raise the quality, reliability and security of services.
• Government can tap into what the commercial cloud can offer in scalability and reliability as well as software services and tools.
• This facilitates public and private sector to work together to develop more user centric services for the public.

The Smart Nation Sensor Platform is an integrated nationwide sensor platform to improve municipal services, city level operations, planning and security. More systematic use of sensors and data to improve urban planning, build more responsible and reliable public transport and better public security. An interconnected network of 110,000 lamp posts with wireless sensors will collate data that will be used for urban and operational planning, maintenance and response.

The Lagos State Government and other State Governments of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, Governments of Rwanda, Kenya, and Mauritius can learn from these three different experiences in adoption and implement smart initiatives and services to digitally transform their nations as well as enjoy the benefits of digital economies. Our continent needs to get 5G adoption and deployment right as it will be important in this redesign.

This is a great idea for health insurance: crowd-insurance. Alibaba Ant Financial’s Xiang Hu Bao, which means mutual protection, has attracted 50 million people since its October inception. Simply, people crowd-insure themselves with no insurance company involved. U.S. Lemonade has something similar but not in health insurance.

The product operates somewhat like a collective, in which members contribute evenly to payouts of as much as 300,000 yuan ($45,000) when a participant falls critically ill. It’s free to sign up, there are no premiums or upfront payments, and disputes about claims are adjudicated by volunteer members, according to a statement from the company on Thursday. In return for managing the process, Ant will take an 8 percent administrative fee out of every payout.

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The company’s foray into health care comes at a time when the country is grappling with a rapidly aging population, one of the more pressing long-term threats to the world’s second-largest economy. Ant said Thursday it hopes to sign up 300 million Xiang Hu Bao users within two years, which would represent more than 20 percent of China’s population.

Managing fraud? “Ant is using the same blockchain technology that underpins digital currencies like Bitcoin, which rely on common verification by members. Members who fall critically ill within 90 days of joining the plan will not be compensated.” They are bringing the tech elements together to deliver new business models.

I think with the deep distrust in the Nigerian insurance, crowd-insurance may be a good idea if the regulators will ever allow such. At least religious organizations and cooperatives can explore the model if platform-tech tools are available to power them. This is a great business to explore in Nigeria but focusing on churches, mosques and cooperatives which already have pre-existing trust infrastructure among themselves.

The insurance industry in Nigeria has used IT for productivity gains. Now is the time for the next level of innovation which is taking the insurance industry to the web. What they have been unable to do for decades – industry penetration acceleration – can happen if they digitize their products and make it possible for Nigerian entrepreneurs to participate via InsureTech. Should that happen, new products will evolve, and could actually deliver the aha moment that will make Nigerians begin to like buying insurance. The time is now: Nigeria needs a 21st century insurance industry.

LinkedIn Comment on Feed

A sort of an insurance model for esusu? Part of the motivation for contribution is that potential date to getting your returns on investment, once that element vanishes, many people could take off… The model can work well for middle-class settings, but what happens to children of the contributors?

Another twist, especially when it’s difficult to know who falls ill more often and who maintains better hygiene. Lots of things to outline. A good experiment worth doing, it can go either way.

Another Comment

Do you realise that that this is very similar to what is already done in the traditional village meetings? Just informally. Where everyone pays levies to the association and when a member is ill or deceased the association handle the cost up to a set amount. As long as the person’s own payment is up to date.

These are three trends and technologies which Diamandis has captured.

Dedicated Lanes for AV: According to KPMG, China is currently ranked 20th in the world on its Autonomous Vehicle Readiness Index. To step up its game, the country is developing new road infrastructure with dedicated autonomous lanes. Slated to begin operation in 2020, the first stretch will be a 100 km road connecting Beijing with the Xiongan New Area in Hebei province. The road will embed sensors and electronic tolls that aid in the development of autonomous technology and facilitate easy payment for cab-hailing companies that begin to rely on driverless vehicles.

AI-Authored Book: Scientific journal publisher Springer Nature just released the first machine generated textbook by a scholarly publisher. Developed by the Applied Computational Linguistics (ACoLi) lab at Goethe University in Frankfurt, “Lithium-Ion Batteries: A Machine-Generated Summary of Current Research” is an attempt to distill insights from the vast amount of research in the area. According to Springer, over 53,000 papers on Lithium Ion batteries have been published in just the last three years. While there is an element of human quality control in the training phase, the algorithm condenses and organizes the pre-approved, peer-reviewed publications into coherent chapters and sections, giving researchers just 180 pages to review and consider versus 100,000+.

Road that Recharges EV Buses: Reimagining electric vehicle (EV) charging from the ground up (literally), the Swedish transport administration is now experimenting with electric dynamic charging roads. In a $12.5 million showcasing project, the Smart Road Gotland consortium will pilot a 1-mile stretch of e-road between Sweden’s Gotland Island airport and the town of Visby, capable of charging electric trucks and buses as they run over it. Funded primarily by the Swedish government, the project will leverage a Dynamic Wireless Electrification System developed by Israeli company Electreon, a driving lane-embedded infrastructure that powers vehicle batteries wirelessly.