Microsoft unveiled the company's plan to leverage its Partner Network to help cities become much more efficient places in the future simply by using the company's software to aggregate data and help understand urban trends. At its Worldwide Partner Conference in Huston, the company announced its CityNext global initiative with the soul purpose of introducing the world to the concept of "smart cities."
The plan involves installing Microsoft products and software in and around cities to harness big data to the cloud. This would then provide users and residents with mobile access to big data tools and cloud-powered enterprise apps that could give them real-time access to advanced analytics. According to InformationWeek, these tools will allow workers to access real data culled from environmental and other sources that could, in theory, give insights to every day city questions and give them the basic tools they need to make informed economic decisions.
For example, a smart city resident can get information about fluctuations in areas such as population density and the level of uneploymnet. This could help him or her decide if he or she should start a business, family or even purchase a house or apartment in that particular area. All of this can be done via a mobile app powered by Microsoft.
The company introduced Barcelona, Spain as a CityNext customer that uses Azure to host and power the platform. Microsoft also announced eight more cities on deck to take part in this grand experiment: Zhengzhou and Hainan Province, both in China; Auckland, New Zealand; Buenos Aires, Argentina; Hamburg, Germany; Manchester, England; Moscow, Russia; and Philadelphia, the only U.S. city to sign up so far.
Microsoft missed out on the first wave of mobile apps to get itself in the mix with aggregation of city and mapping information while Apple and Google both capitalized. However, with CityNext the company is clearly ready to hit the ground running with the next wave of mobile app developments.
