Conversations on the VERGE

THE INNOVATION:
"VERGE" is an initiative of the GreenBiz Group, creating a forum for and accelerating the movement of the emerging convergence among -- power grids, buildings, cities, transportation and beyond. VERGE acknowledges and celebrates the deep interconnection between these critical systems -- and invites and supports its evolution. Bring it on!

Derek Top
VERGE Program Director

Joel Makower
Chairman and Executive Editor

www.GreenBiz.com

At InnovatingSMART, we participated in the 2012 VERGE SF conference with an eye and ear to learning more about SMART Information-Technology-infused infrastructures – smart cities, buildings, utilities, assets, materials; the Big Data that informs them; and the apps-building Hackathons that play with the possible.  To this end, we spoke one-on-one with these fascinating folks. 

Listen to their stories, and understand our real power to impact the world.  Business as Usual is changing, and this is what that change looks like...

The Conversations...

Hacking Solutions at the VERGE Hackathon – Krys Freeman, GreenBiz Group
Seeing the Un-seeable through Big Data – Kathrin Winkler, EMC
Accelerating SMART Cities – Jesse Berst, Smart Cities Council
SMART High-Performance Buildings – Melissa O’Mara, Schneider Electric
SMART Utilities: Virtual Power Plants - Laura Manz, Veridity Energy
SMART Utilities: Net-Zero-Energy Data Centers - Dean Nelson, Ebay
SMART Supply Chain: Stopping the Value Leak - Gil Friend, Natural Logic
SMART Assets: Serving Up Integrated Data- David Ziglenski, OSIsoft

Plus…
Green Building Efficiencies at Scale - Pete Scarpelli, CBRE
Toward a Smart City: Inviting Innovation- Melanie Nutter, City of SF

And More…
The Urban Food Revolution- Peter Ladner, Author
Saving Forests through Carbon Offsets - Jeff Waldon, Forest Carbon Offsets 

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Reflections from GreenBiz...

GreenBiz has summarized the Two-Day conference here:
 Day 1 Highlights - by Joel Makower
 Day 2 Hightlights- by Kristine Wong

Also, check out:
A quick visual roundup from VERGE
A slideshow
that includes links to all the VERGE stories on the GreenBiz site

 

Other compelling observations on the excitement ahead:

from Rachel Barge, reporting on VERGE: Accelerate:
Perhaps the stickiest quote of the conversation came from Mitch Lowe: 'Cleantech’s dead in the same way the Internet was dead in 2000.' … Just as Internet and computing companies of the mid and late 1990’s laid the foundation for the booming web industry today, cleantech of the mid-2000’s laid the infrastructural groundwork for the emerging digital cleantech industry to expand. We are right on the cusp of an incredibly exciting time....

And on the indirect emergence of "clean" outcomes:
Innovation in digital transportation, financial services, or collaborative consumption – are all cases where the “clean” outcome is a second-order consequence of the business. These are models where positive environmental impacts are a happy outcome of adoption, but not the primary value proposition of why customers bought the product or used the service.

Core concepts of VERGE were affirmed in a subsequent announcement by GE and reported by Joel: In many ways, GE’s new Industrial Internet push — articulated in a report issued last week and at a high-profile San Francisco event — meshes with (and validates) our global series of VERGE events, which cover similar ground: the convergence of systems and technologies around buildings and transportation, and how data and IT create new platforms that enable radical efficiencies, breakthrough business models, and innovative products and services.