In this episode, Darren talks with Eric Hornsby, CEO of SmartPoint.io, about technology for realizing smart city potential.
Eric had a long career in the data center and, more recently, in the digital signage space. His passions are project management and technology deployment and operation. Eric and his team were part of an LG Electronics joint venture company that deployed outdoor digital signage, primarily for advertising applications in dense urban areas, transit venues, and city streets. They learned a lot about other applications in those environments that compute resources and other forms of connectivity that would help enhance the experience brought on by IoT. SmartPoint.io was born out of that ecosystem and a desire to work with and drive opportunity and advancement in that market space.
In the data center, Eric was part of a lifecycle solutions company that helped companies optimize server storage and network hardware from an acquisition, a refresh cycle, and everything in between. His role was focused on helping the channel of companies that sold those solutions, but also how they were purchased, financed, and how they depreciated over time, so he learned not just about the technology but how people were using it and managing that value as an asset on their balance sheet.
When people talk about smart cities, they think of resilience, equity, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness. Cities provide essential services such as roads, public safety, water, and sewer. The primary thing a municipality brings to its citizens is starting to include connectivity, the ability to access computing, and taking advantage of technological advancements to help provide basic services more efficiently. Smart technology has been expensive and risky, and few municipal budgets have room for it.
Eric’s background in finance is an asset in creating and deploying smart city technology in a partnership that provides an affordable model. Being able to deploy the current significant funding for infrastructure projects in resilient and economically sustainable ways is a major tenet of what SmartPoint does when partnering with a city.
To achieve economic sustainability, Eric’s team took a hard look at digital signage, primarily for advertising, which generates a tremendous amount of revenue. Some of the largest companies in the world are primarily funded by advertising revenue, and one of the primary products or resources is the people to whom they are advertising. Layering attribution, customers’ traits, and likenesses increase revenue.
Cities have a treasure trove of value in the people, commercial entities, and visitors that reside within their real estate. So the core of what SmartPoint.io is doing is leveraging that real estate to generate revenue but directly aligning it with solutions that produce meaningful outcomes in city services. Getting this technology into the cities requires help from the private sector and willingness from the public sector to work together.
Advertising revenue, along with being able to tap into the budgets of city services, allows a financial model that raises the tide for all boats, from providing safer transportation to greater returns on advertising. When you tie the advertising benefit back to the people to whom the advertising is directed, you create a circular local economy that increases value and efficiency.
Edge computing is a significant part of SmartPoint.io’s product. The digital signage box is also like a portable data center. Data does not have to go back to a large data center somewhere but is processed at the edge. For example, video data from the ubiquitous cameras in a city to watch traffic patterns is bandwidth-intensive. Still, the data transport is significantly reduced if it is cached, stored, or processed locally.
Three great things about these boxes are that they do a great job of reducing latency, cost and increasing privacy. The privacy issue seems counterintuitive, but the video data, for example, is not traveling over public IP. Analysis happens at the point of capture, so it is not transported across the pipe, observed, or taken several hops where security needs to be tracked. Instead of the image, it sends the event “A person walking down the street.” This data can be scrubbed and anonymized much earlier in the analysis cycle before it leaves the box, protecting people’s privacy.
The boxes could also provide services such as Wi-Fi or 5G hotspots to underserved areas.
Once the boxes are deployed, SmartPoint.io has a team that monitors and operates the technology, just like a data center would for a company. They also partner with advertisers. Many advertisers are interested in migrating from static “paper poster” advertising to digital. SmartPoint.io is a great partner for those advertisers because they come with upfront CapEx funding.
With the cities, the model is revenue share or paid in kind. Instead of just sharing top-line revenue, however, SmarPoint.io produces and operates resources such as IT infrastructure that the city can then use to process optical data at the edge.
Digital signage can be interactive, which benefits people trying to find services, restaurants, shopping, events, and entertainment. Commercial tenants can use it as a portal for new economic development because they can reach the people walking around. In turn, the boxes give back valuable information, such as how many people were downtown or if an ad campaign successfully brought them there.
This model will help smart cities because it defers the cost of CapEx and the OpEx of managing the hardware out in the wild and the refresh cycles. Taking risks on expensive, relatively new technology is also not a normal behavior for a municipality, so partnering with the private sector with a significant appetite for risk, know-how, and funding helps the cities to mitigate the risks and costs and get further out in front of where they would be typically comfortable.
In the end, Eric says that successes are starting to build in this space, and they build on one another. Everyone is learning new things, and it’s an excellent opportunity to come together and build community, which is what cities are all about.
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