There are various ways in which technology giants face "smart cities"

On July 19th, Fortune announced the list of the world's top 500 companies in 2018. Throughout the list, it can be seen that the technology companies have experienced a significant jump. North American technology giants such as Google, Amazon, and Facebook are still strong. The industrial layout and business advantages of the technology giants are different. However, in today's technology platform, there are many areas where people overlap.

Curious babies may have such a question: Is there any business, is the technology company in the top 500 in the layout?

Not to mention, this God question actually has two answers. Whether it is the "North American Powers", or China's BAT and JD.com, or China Unicom's two major operators, as well as Ping An and other financial technology companies, today there is a technology that is jointly bet, called AI; there is also a joint force The market is called the city.

The waves of smart cities are getting more and more turbulent. We know that in the PC era and the mobile era, Internet companies and financial companies often accumulate technological advantages through different businesses and markets. On the occasion of the AI-driven wisdom era, urban and resident life has become a track that only "big players" can aim and must aim at. Behind this, it seems to hide some historical necessity of the development of intelligent technology.

Driven by the same technological drivers and the responsibility of the times, technology companies are delegating AI and other cutting-edge technologies to the people's lives, and they have become the universal presence of the general public. Based on the different layouts and advantages of the giants, the hard state of the city is being shaped into different shapes by the technical potential.

Let us look back at the hardships between the top 500 technology companies and smart cities. The cause and effect of this may be related to the life of the residents of you and me in the next ten years.

The city is the best mold: technology giants need AI solid state in this era

What is a city? From Socrates to Said, from the two rivers to the North American coast, the definitions, ideas and ideas of countless cities have been played on this planet. But when smart technologies such as AI arrived, we suddenly found out that humans know little about the reinforced concrete and the monsters made up of millions of people.

To understand the truth behind the smart city, we must first explore the AI ​​as the driving force of a smart city, why must we choose the city as a stage in this era.

Unlike PC and mobile hardware, the essence of AI is the algorithmic model, or even a statistical and cognitive logic deduction. In other words, all forms of AI existence are retreat and relatively far from the mass market. But how does AI play a role in the mass market in the context of the AI's ability to identify, perceive, understand, and reason?

The first step is to turn the "in-the-air", invisible AI algorithm into a liquid, and let the water flow to wash the market. That is what we call AI applications. Face recognition, voice interaction and other technologies have indeed brought about changes in market dynamics and human-machine collaboration models.

However, AI applications are multi-domain and ubiquitous. If you want ordinary people to feel AI and play the greatest value of AI, you need to solidify liquid and mobile AI - let AI have a relatively stable time-space relationship. Play the benefits and create the market.

This time-space relationship can be a factory, a school, a park, and a mold and a stage that can maximize the value of AI, that is, a city. Because the city brings together a huge amount of data, there is a huge demand and operation, there are a variety of service ports and paperwork, which is a quality soil that AI can bring value.

It should be noted that the concept of AI driving smart cities today requires a large business system, service capabilities and platform architecture to support. Therefore, it is possible to fully bid on the smart city layout and drive AI into the public life, only in capital and technology. Technology giants with advantages in systems, business systems and market structures.

So we can see that the top 500 technology companies have chosen smart city as the main track. This is because the smart city is a huge market that meets the needs of technology development and AI. It is also because it drives the urban life iteration, which is the social responsibility that can only be completed by the technology giant today. And as a smart city with massive subdivision scenarios and a huge market that is difficult to estimate its development potential, it is also the first choice for giants to bet on the next era.

Combining the two, we have seen that AI technology + urban stage has become the only way for technology giants. Among the latest Fortune 500 companies, technology companies have their own smart city industrial layout and technological advantages.

In this feast that made AI a solid state in the city, technology companies are working hard to pinch the city into different shapes...

The dream of the city of North American technology giants

In the 1970s, the fast-growing Detroit tried to use mathematical methods to provide a basis for urban planning, which is widely regarded as the "antiquity model" of smart cities. Under the condition that there is no electronic computer at the time, it is conceivable to calculate the difficulty of a city. But the fire of the stars will at least bring enlightenment and thinking to future generations.

The official origin of the smart city is widely recognized as the intellectual planet project launched by IBM in the 1980s. The plan hopes to achieve better management of urban transportation, energy and construction programs based on the calculation of urban models, but soon found The reality is not so good. For classic computing, the amount of data and the rate of change in the city are too fast. And with the help of waston, cognitive intelligence has brought new smart city possibilities to IBM, but its success is generally considered too general.

Beyond IBM, North American emerging technology giants are also beginning to deploy smart cities based on AI and cloud computing. In the early days, Microsoft opened the "urban computing" system against IBM. In the 20 years of development, urban computing technology has brought many amazing results. It is worth mentioning that Jingdong began to absorb the urban computing talents and technologies of Microsoft Research Asia in 2017, and applied it to the fields of smart logistics and unbounded retail layout. It can be seen as the re-development of urban computing technology in China.

After cloud computing became the battleground for the tech giants, the idea of ​​cloud + AI building urban intelligence began to rise. For example, Google's smart community solution in Toronto. Under the blessing of cloud computing, Google has built a smart community with exemplary meaning in Toronto. Join AI solutions in areas such as transportation and public security.

And Google's old rival Amazon, based on AWS's strong market share and platform advantages, launched a future urban solution, mainly dedicated to the intelligence of transportation and other fields.

Interestingly, although the smart city solutions of North American technology giants have been launched very early, the pace of progress in the Chinese market is not fast. Due to the large population of China's cities and the complex service system, and the mobile Internet has given birth to the rapid iteration of urban population lifestyles, there is an urgent need for local technology companies to better meet the needs of smart city solutions. For China, the city dance of North American technology giants is more like an origin. Through this point, the city's intelligent dream began to ignite in the east.

Smart life opens up long-term development

After 2010, the concept of smart city has become increasingly popular, and various IT companies and startups have begun to enter the smart city market. As of 2017, more than 3,000 smart city-related projects have been established nationwide.

Among the huge market bases, BAT represents an Internet technology company that is very dazzling. Based on the business advantages and technical system of BAT itself, the smart city model of traditional cloud computing + data visualization has made a rapid breakthrough, and in recent years, the smart city track has been upgraded to a new height.

More representative of this aspect is that Tencent has made breakthroughs in smart government and smart medical care.

In terms of smart government, Tencent relies on powerful social application genes and massive Internet data processing capabilities. The integration of smart government has been completed in the super platform of WeChat. So far, more than 5,000 government projects have been concentrated on WeChat in China. Especially in cities in the southeast, many government services can already be done remotely on WeChat.

Another map of Tencent comes from its main medical imaging field. Through AI applications such as Tencent's film, Tencent has established a technical system that can serve smart cities. The Ministry of Science and Technology also announced that it will rely on Tencent to build a new generation of artificial intelligence open innovation platform for medical imaging.

This breakthrough in key areas and the formation of its own advantages in the ubiquitous urban intelligence system can be seen as a linear body in a smart city. Promote the overall smart city layout with advances in certain areas. .

Obviously, in the busy process of Tencent, its old friend Ali is not idle.

City brain online

One of the important bottlenecks for AI to solve urban problems is the massive data and city ports that are difficult to be identified and processed separately. In order to deal with this problem, Ali first proposed the idea of ​​installing a brain for urban traffic: by erecting a large number of urban sensing systems, using the super-calculation platform to globally process data, let AI actively judge and intervene in urban operations, thereby improving urban efficiency.

Dr. Wang Jian’s idea eventually became the brain of the ET city that was successfully deployed in Xiaoshan District of Hangzhou. The concept of urban brain has also been extended to Suzhou, Macao and other places, and has deep cooperation with Xiong'an New District. Become a member of the "AI National Team" in the field of urban intelligence.

For the massive data maps of urban traffic and security, and the installation of human-machine coordination processing hubs, it can be seen as a network of complex urban nerve lines. Later, similar technologies will continue to be released from the transportation sector and continue to be released into urban security, urban logistics, urban environment and hydrology. The formation of a multi-domain joint release of the urban brain, which will also give urban intelligence the opportunity to weave a network in the steel jungle, forming a network to control the overall network of agents.

Urban solutions based on existing formats

Smart cities have developed to the present day, and they are also facing various problems. One of the most serious is the so-called "air building."

Most of the companies that participate in the market share of smart cities rely on a certain kind of technological innovation or business model to enter the market. The ensuing problem is that their solutions may be effective, but they are not linked to the actual industry. It is necessary to start a new part of urban life. Such a "big demolition and large construction" smart city model obviously does not meet the expectations of residents for smart cities in terms of cost and efficiency.

Another problem with such technology companies is that their technological innovations tend to focus on one aspect. But urban life is complicated, and the city is broken into scattered pieces. The end result is that smart technology has become empty.

For example, in a hospital, if the smart access control is provided by one company, the outpatient system comes from another company, and the intelligent diagnosis system comes from another... All these kinds of medical personnel will be confused first, but they will not dare to work. "The big frame." This situation is not a case today.

Therefore, another kind of differentiated understanding of smart cities believes that companies that have strong physical business accumulation and can actually bond urban services and intelligent technologies should perform excessive wisdom.

The smart city under this kind of thinking has led to the entry of financial technology companies, telecom operators, banks and insurance platforms, and logistics companies. The smart city solutions provided by such enterprises are often closer to practical use, and it is relatively easy to grasp the control power according to their actual industries, and to provide smart city solutions capable of extending to all walks of life and all regions of the city.

For example, Ping An and other financial and insurance companies have launched intelligent business through existing business systems such as financial services, insurance, and medical care, and gradually realized the so-called urban wisdom. Traditional financial services and communication operators should not be underestimated when they enter smart cities. Quickly approaching new smart technologies in life often starts with them.

No matter which technology giant, the shape of the city is pinched. The interactive iteration brought by technologies such as AI and the improvement of urban efficiency are indeed changing our city and even the life we ​​are used to.

Perhaps after reviewing the wisdom of the entire Chinese city, we will find that we can solve practical problems and be able to cope with the diversity and complexity of the city. It is always the biggest bottleneck we face. When the underground giant ship like Ping An Group was put into the sea of ​​smart cities, the final ice began to melt.

Regarding the dance of the city's AI era, it only opened the corner of the curtain.