Mobilithek goes mobile

The FAZ has received a new draft law for the sovereign handling and exchange of industrial data within the EU (“Data Governance Act”, link to FAZ article).

Many people now use a smart lighting solution for their home. However, it is not only private individuals who have discovered the advantages of an intelligent lighting system; cities are also relying on this solution.

A lot of waste is generated in cities and garbage cans are often overcrowded. They are emptied as soon as the garbage collector has them on their schedule. In order to counteract this problem, one must know the filling levels of the buckets and determine the optimal time of emptying.

On 28 and 29 October 2019, the most important personalities from politics and business met in Dortmund. This is this year’s digital meeting, at which, in addition to the focus on digital platforms, the Gaia-X project, which is a vision for the future in Europe, was presented.

The first rule of success with data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) is to use (a) the right data and (b) in the right quantity, because AI can only extract insights if the information for it is captured in the data – and the more, the better. For example, if predicting the failure of a machine is the objective, then any data input for creating the algorithm must contain information on past failure events and lots of these events. Otherwise, it is “garbage in, garbage out” (GIGO).

Data monetization is promised to be the next big thing. Analysts and consultants are promising hundreds of billions in revenue (e.g., McKinsey 2016). Her excellence the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, is addressing the downside, sternly warning German industry to catch up: “If we let this element of value creation be taken out of our hands, then it will be a rude awakening for Germany as an industrial country” (Merkel 2019, link, at 13:17).

Data is promised to be the next big business (e.g., Wall 2019, Gartner 2018a). Investment banks, analysts and consultants further feed the frenzy with big revenue forecasts. In terms of data monetization opportunities, consultants McKinsey & Company estimate that car-generated data alone will be worth between US$450 billion and US$750 billion by 2030, less than two vehicle generations away (McKinsey 2016). Consumer data is already a big business today. Google and Facebook live off the data that users create on their platforms. Almost all their revenue is from advertising, selling “eyeballs” and user engagement to advertisers.

Something in the air. Municipalities are responsible for making sure there’s clean air on their streets. To do so, air quality is measured at selected locations with the aid of complex and expensive sensors and transmitted to the responsible authorities such as the state, federal government or the EU.

Municipalities gather a lot of information. In order for citizens to be able to use this information, various types of data have to be collected, processed and published: