Super Bowl 50: An Experience Enhanced by Silicon Valley Technologies

Omar Soubra, Trimble’s star in the maker community, made us aware of a fascinating innovative geospatial cleanup app for sprucing up San Jose for its influx of visitors for the 50th anniversary of the Super Bowl in newly opened Levi Stadium in Santa Clara. All sorts of events were planned for Sunday in San Jose from the Opening Night at SAP center, to hosting one of the teams staying downtown and practicing at San Jose State to many people involved in all sorts of activities during this past weekend. The City of San Jose wanted to present its best face to its visitors and devised a cleanup campaign to ensure the impression from the over a million people was one of viewing a clean, safe city in action and that following this major event, it will become part of the city’s improved processes. The City Council turned to CommUniverCity to help them in these efforts once the funding for a Trimble geospatial technology app was approved. This is a partnership between the city, San Jose State University and the community. The team of 18 people were from these three organizations lead by graduate and upper-division undergraduate students who also developed the Trimble application. They created a pilot of the main “hot spots” where illegal dumping was occurring and then used Trimble’s TerraFlex field data capture software to create data collection forms with fields for features and conditions such as location of trash (sidewalk, median, fence line), type of trash, accessibility and whether it was hazardous or electronic. From this they made maps with exact locations for haulers to remove the trash. The workers could use any of their own devices to run the program. “When a user opens a form, the software marks the location on an internal map. Workers can then verify the location, fill in the fields on the form and capture at least one geo-referenced photo.” For this pilot which lasted three days with four cars and two people/vehicle, they were able to identify 800 sites. Once these sites were identified, CommUniverCity created maps for the trash haulers who could easily find the sites and clean up. And because the data was centralized, the city could go back and conduct analytics by area and demographics to understand patterns of activities. It will be interested to hear the results following all of this weekend’s activities. As Environmental Leader reported on Monday, ”Super Bowl 50 victory went to the Denver Broncos last night but the waste management winner was Trimble Geospatial Solutions, which provided the geospatial technology used to clean up illegal dumping sites across San Jose, California.” [1] Trimble was not alone in a Silicon Valley tech company getting involved in the Super Bowl. Look at this partial list of what other tech companies did for this weekend: •Intuit created a platform called Business Connect to link local small businesses (sign makers, florists, etc.) with Super Bowl preparation efforts. •Google developed the “Road to 50” app which is a local pocket guide for out of town visitors with information on all the events and activities going on last week. It also provided its fleet of over 100 buses running on renewable diesel fuel to pick fans up from around the city and drive them to the Super Bowl. •Verizon pledged to enhance its 4G LTE network •Extreme Networks provided a customized Wi-Fi overlay •Uber had a special lot allotted to them about 15 minutes away from the stadium for more efficient transportation services •SAP built an app to connect the 7000 volunteers who were assembled in the Bay area •Apple supplied its tech equipment where needed Link to video: Microsoft: Imagining the future for NFL fansBut you have to see the really fun future visioning of what it could be like to watch Super Bowl 51 with Microsoft’s HoloLens. They worked with the NFL and utilized the same mixed reality platform that we are piloting in the Trimble Real Estate & Workplace Solutions group to image the future of FM and real estate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=oKqzeoMCU0c It has been predicted that by next year, at least 20 of the world’s largest countries will create national smart city policies to prioritize funding and document technical and business guidelines. By looking at how all of these Silicon Valley tech companies contributed to the various smart city initiatives for this one special sports focused weekend, it certainly heightened community awareness of the value of technology in the urban environment, as well as demonstrating to us what it may mean in the future to watch sports at home with a HoloLens crown on your head.

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