Bristol’s ‘Smart City’ reserved for boffins. Sorry bumpkins The City of Bristol claims it will be the world’s first programmable city, after launching a software-defined network that will deliver ultra-fast fibre and a wireless canopy across the city. However, locals hoping to hop on to the network being rolled out along the watery town’s Brunel Mile will be disappointed, as it will be …
There's bit more high tech in Bristol than "Just Eat". For example there's Imagination (PowerVR graphics, video, MIPS), Nvidia (Icera), Broadcom, Huawei (CPU design centre) ... and that's just the companies within 5 mins walk of where I work. Bit further out there's CSR, Infineon, HP Labs, XMOS, BluWireless, Intel along with many other high tech industries such as Airbus, RollsRoyce etc. + the Universities and associated incubator companies. Spread out to Bath and you add more plus more in Swindon etc.
Processor design arrived in Bristol when INMOS started 35 years ago and a recent event to mark this claimed that there were now 3-4000 people employed in the industry in the region as a result. INMOS was taken over by ST - their office building is also 5 mins walk from me but is sadly empty since they shut down the site 12 months ago.
So basically you can see Bristol as being Silicon Roundabout but without the Roundabout and with a lot more silicon. As for exodus from silicone (sic) valley ... no need for that - plenty of good engineers here already - that's why companies set up design centres here!
INMOS was taken over by ST - their office building is also 5 mins walk from me
When I got a job there, it was by far and away the best gig I'd ever had. I loved that job[1].
I was really quite shocked to hear the site had closed :-(
Vic.
[1] Owing to the quite fantabulous way the internal management worked, our (new technology, customer focussed) group was swapped for a different (legacy development) group in the same building. Neither group was happy about the exchange, and most of us left. So by the end, it was amongst the worst jobs I'd ever had :-(
We aren't actually bumpkins here, and there are lots of interesting things going on alongside Just Eat. As well as the people working out how to blow things up from the air (MoD, BAe, etc), we've got a nice little set of big data companies, Cray setting up shop and -for better or worse- Oracle. All R&D stuff.
come over and eat at some of famous eateries like Slix of Stokes Croft (check the Yelp reviews), then enjoy some of our fine beverages, which covers more than just cider. Oddly enough, Bristols most profitable local "craft product" is actually homegrown Ganja, but the "green city" event doesn't seem to highlight that.
Regarding the Smart City, there's already enough bandwidth for recreational needs, provided you aren't on Virgin Media in the parts of the city where students live. If their bittorrent feeds can be moved onto this new network, all will be well.
Where it does fall down is that it has no interesting data sources. London, especially TfL have some fantastic historical CSV files as well as live feeds.
Bristol? There's a downloadable spreadsheet of shopping trollies found in rivers:
http://data.gov.uk/dataset/abandoned-shopping-trolleys-bristol-rivers
What are you meant to do with that? Write a "trolley-watch" app for your iwatch that pops up to tell you whenever you are within 300 metres of an abandoned Shopping trolley? Integrate with OpenStreetMap for a live trolley-viewer web site?
Without data, the open city is useless, irrespective of bandwidth. And whatever is being collected, there's no sign of it being made publicly downloadable.
I do now have a use of the shopping trolley data.
If combined with one of homeless people you could use it as a new navigation layer in google maps, "turn left after the homeless person and continue until you reach the shopping trolley. Your destination is on the right".
But without those live feeds of shopping trolleys or homeless people: its just not useful enough.
I was going to post re the death of the internat of 'fings and hail the birth of the internet of cities.
It seems the obituary is a little prematute then. BWISTOL BE NOW'T WI'OUT 'T COMMECTED 'FRIDGE 'T GEE'T DATA.
Or something.
Somehow I doubt this thing's going to fly far apart from to the pork barrel.
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