What is Living PlanIT?

Who are we?

It is projected that by 2050 70% of the world's population will live in cities consuming the vast bulk of the world's resources. New insights and solutions are urgently required to manage these scarce resources efficiently and to operate new and regenerated urban spaces for the benefit of all*. This trend is already underway, with new generations of sensor networks in public and private managed physical spaces being developed. Living PlanIT has developed the essential platform that extracts, aggregates, analyses and manages sensor data in these environments. We are in an emerging growth sector, collaborating with many of the world’s leading technology companies.

What do we do?

We own and monetize the Urban Operating System (UOS™) which provides the essential platform for Machine to Machine Communication (the “M2M market”), which is estimated to expand to 24 billion smart sensors and connected devices by 2020 and to be worth US$1.2 trillion by 2020.**

This process is the industrialization of the Internet, its third stage ***, and is facilitated by the UOS™, enabling an unlimited number of devices to be interrogated, analyzed and controlled, and in turn harvesting useful intelligence and also enabling management, control and greater efficiency for many city services.

The M2M integration of services provides the technology solution for creating sustainable Living Cities**** (aka Smart or Intelligent) cities, improving energy management, transportation, health services, education and many others aspects of daily life. The UOS™ provides that platform; and like Windows or Apple’s IOS, it also enables apps to be developed independently by large and small companies, as well as public sector agencies, to deliver innovative services and new opportunities that enhance the experience of urban living for all.

UOS™ Technical definition

The UOS™ is the programming platform and operating infrastructure for the development of these sensor networks and the distributed sensing applications that run on them. The UOS™ centrally collects, aggregates, orchestrates and analyzes the data generated in a sensor-rich environment, facilitating access to applications, management tools, services and all manner of intelligent devices, from those embedded in the fabric of buildings, to those that manage, among other services, energy, water, waste, education, and transportation, as well as medical and interactive surfaces.

We have developed an ecosystem of partner companies whose technologies and applications extend UOS™ capabilities to provide platform and industry solutions.

Our business model

Our business model is based on our integrated ecosystem of partners which leverages the UOS™ to extend its value while providing new services to their customers. We bring these partners together to integrate their technologies on the UOS™ to offer real estate and other sectors an integrated range of services and opportunities, replacing the siloed solutions that have traditionally been on offer. We also continuously seek to secure early customer adoption, and to capture initial customer projects (“Design wins”) that demonstrate and deploy the UOS™ at scale.

Through these channels, we generate three primary revenue sources:

• We license our product to partners for deployment into the built environment and enhancement of their value propositions to their customers.
• Second, we sell services that help governments, developers and other sectors integrate a range of technologies and systems in large-scale projects and realize dramatic improvements in construction and operating efficiencies.
• Thirdly, as our UOS serves as a platform and distribution point for creators of applications that serve specific needs for the wide range of individual and institutional customers in the urban environment, we earn royalties and revenue share from such opportunities.

Who are our partners?

We license our products and provide associated services to:

• Technology Partners who take the platform to market. We place elements of the UOS™ at the heart of the platforms of the major networking companies (example: Cisco) and the major software and cloud operating system vendors (example: Microsoft). Those equipment and software platforms then link with the UOS™.
• Industrial Partners who will license the UOS™, or use the UOS™ as the fundamental integration layer for their broad ranges of products (examples: Philips, Hitachi).
• Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) who develop applications that take advantage of the sensor networks to bring new services and efficiency in a variety of domains. For example, one of our partners, Gehry Technologies, enables new techniques in construction by applying manufacturing best practices in design and simulation.
• A large Ecosystem of Partners across many industries and practices, including consulting, engineering firms (Buro Happold), service providers (Deutsche Telekom) and systems integrators all of whom take our platform to market, selling the value proposition and business model.

Who are our customers?

Our customers include our Partners and real estate developers, as well as other others engaged in the built environment, both private and public (including Governments, central and local) who require a technology platform (the UOS™) to orchestrate and manage complex assets and services at scale. In addition the UOS™ is being developed as a generic platform which our partners will take to a wide number of vertical industries including the transportation, health, retail and telecom sectors.

Endorsements

• World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer 2012
• World Investment Conference – Best Foreign Investment in Europe in High Tech 2009
• UK – Technology Strategy Board; Mayor’s office in London; (Olympic) Borough of Newham
• Two Harvard Business School Case Studies
• United Nations where our models, input and presentations have contributed to the UN preparatory process of the Rio+20 Conference and the 2012 the UN International Year of Sustainable Energy for All
• Strategic partners including Buro Happold, McLaren Electronics, Cisco, Microsoft, Deutsche Telekom, GE, Hitachi and Philips.
• Portugal Project of National Interest for PlanIT Valley project

Notes

* Cisco has estimated that US$10 -13 trillion will be spent over the next 10 years on the construction of new cities and retrofitting existing urban spaces creating an addressable technology market of $400B.

** October 2011 GSMA (an association of mobile operators and related companies)

*** The first was about productivity, the second about collaboration, the third is about connecting devices, sensors and buildings.

**** “Living Cities” incorporates key concepts that we believe are integral to successfully envisioning, retrofitting, building and managing cities in the 21st century. These are: recognition of the need for continual evolution; the importance of clear metrics and analytics; the increased connection between urban dwellers and the buildings in which they live and work; a sense of possibility and openness; increased efficiency; generative structures that learn; agile infrastructures that serve multiple functions and respond to environmental and other changes; and resilient systems that can recover without breaking down and that resist obsolescence. We thus envision Living Cities as generative, inclusive, agile, dynamically evolving and resilient.