SXSW Interactive 2010: John Tolva Talks Smarter Cities

John Tolva has a very cool job.

And in his capacity as IBM director of citizenship and technology in our corporate philanthropy group, John has also worked on some very cool projects.

Take, for example, the Virtual Forbidden City, which launched in time for the Beijing Olympic games in 2008 and helped bring a Chinese cultural landmark to life in virtual reality.

These days, John is very much living and breathing in the real world, helping identify cities around the globe to be candidates for IBM’s “city forward” efforts.

In the process, he’s demonstrating how IBM can help cities become smarter in the way they are built, revised and run, and in the services they can provide their citizens.

You can learn more about IBM’s smarter cities efforts here.

Considering that 70% of the world’s population is expected to live in cities by the year 2050, we all have a vested interest in helping city systems improve no matter where in the world we live.

Listen to this podcast (16:25, MP3) we recorded recently at SXSW Interactive in Austin to hear John explain smarter cities in more and fascinating detail, and also to discuss his experience in the IBM Corporate Service Corps, IBM’s equivalent of the Peace Corps.

SXSW Interactive 2010: Smarter Social Media

Thanks again to everyone who showed up yesterday during the LAST time slot of SXSW Interactive on the very LAST day to hear myself, Adam Lavelle, and our fellow speakers (the hashtag for my talk was #unsociablecompanies).

I called the attendees of the “Fast 15” session the “Green Berets” for having stuck it out so long, and considering we were stacked against Bruce Sterling’s always hilarious and sobering closing keynote, I figured we might only have a few of the Hilton staff stopping by to listen, but in fact there was at one point a line out the door!

Thanks very much for all the great conversation and questions afterward, and the always fun-to-replay Twitterstream.  I saw that a few of you mentioned wanting to have access to the slides, so I’m attaching them below as a PDF.  I’m also included a less-than-10-minute video recap of the session for those of you could not attend.

Expect more blog posts highlighting a number of additional podcasts that Scott Laningham and I conducted during SXSWi 2010, as well as closing day recap along with David Salinas.

For everyone I met and spoke with at the event, I hope you enjoyed SXSW 2010 and learned as much as I did, and I wish you all well on your travels home and your attempts to climb out from under the email pile!

SXSW Interactive 2010: SXSW Interactive 2010 — Smarter Social Media — Final — Todd Watson (PDF, 3.8MB)