Smart cities will need machines that 'talk' to one another

Deutsche Telekom and smart-city technology company Living PlanIT are teaming up to develop ways to allow a wide variety of devices to communicate with one another to build “an intelligent, interconnected urban infrastructure.”

A smooth transfer of data between devices will be critical to enable an era of smart cities based on machine-to-machine (M2M) communications, according to the two companies.

Their goal is to dramatically improve the efficiency of buildings and cities by using networks of sensors to turn buildings into “powerful communications assets.” Living PlanIT has developed a middleware Urban Operating System (UOS) designed to enable such sensors to be deployed at scale.

“M2M technology and its applications have an enormous potential to make our lives easier, safer and much healthier in the very near future,” said Markus Breitbach of partner management at Deutsche Telekom’s Machine to Machine Competence Center. “We believe our collaboration will help develop new business models for managing and delivering urban services, becoming the standard platform for transforming cities and communities.”