I wrote already a blog about the Extreme Blue team for Smarter Cities at the end of the first week of the project. At the end of the second they came up with 103 ‘new’ ideas. I went through the list and could reduce the list drastically, as just out of my mind I found about 70% of the ideas existed already. I must admit that some of the remaining 30 ideas were really crazy, but also unrealistic given the constraints of the program (mainly time) and the objective to make it a success. The list was further reduced by some of my colleagues who also evaluated the list and were aware of existing initiatives.

Series meetings with representatives of cities, companies specialized in traffic management, academic institutions, and the IBM labs of La Gade were the input to further refine the ideas and shorted the list to less then ten ideas. At the end of the third week eight ideas remained.

Unfortunately sad news came in at the end of the third week, one of the four students decided to leave the project. It’s the first time we have lost a student on an Extreme Blue project. But optimism and good spirit remains in the team, taking the challenge to build the best extreme blue project ever even with three team members.

In between I took them to the music and theatre festival in the city of Ghent. And mMy colleague Frank organized a meeting with the first Extreme Blue team we had in Belgium, back in 2007.

TelePresence with the La Gaude labs and the students

Extreme Blue 2012 meets Extreme Blue 2007

We are now at the end of the fourth week and have a shortlist of three ideas.

- The first idea aims to be life-saving in healthcare.

- The second idea aims to improve the situation in emergency cases in cities.

- The third idea aims to reduce the increasing traffic jams in cities.

Sorry that I can not disclose the details right now. The important thing is that we have three great ideas!

Over the next days a serious evaluation of these three ideas must lead to the single winning idea.

Thereafter the upstream battle begins to implement that winning idea from a technical point (making of a prototype) and a business point (making the business case).

Extreme Blue 2012 meets Extreme Blue 2007