Problem: I was watching 60 Minutes earlier this week where I came across a fascinating story: volcanic eruption prediction. “What if we could predict volcanic eruptions the same way we predict the weather?” asked Bill Whitaker in this June 2023 broadcast. Most interesting to me about the broadcast is how scientists go about doing this. Unsurprisingly, it’s through deep and extensive data collection. But did you know that Fiber Optic Cables are one of the newest ways of collecting extremely sensitive data? There are fiber optic cables everywhere in our modern cities. Is there a way to take advantage of this latent hardware in order to create more data-enabled cities?
Subscribe here to get access to the first 500 ideas from our blog. For just one coffee a month, you can have access to more than $500 billion dollars of ideas. What's not to love?
Solution: This business would create partnerships with telecom companies, local governments, and public works or civil engineering businesses in order to capture and re-sell city-wide data on a massive scale. It would capture data like vibrations from cars to estimate traffic, weight on the floor to predict the number of pedestrians on the street, soakage to understand how rainfall or snow can affect under-ground conditions, data for insurance companies about how to insure specific risks for buildings, and more. While I’m not sure what all the data would be used for, more data is certainly better!
Of course the first question is, is this even feasible? Based on the 60 Minutes video, the answer is a resounding yes. Here is a small excerpt:
Bill Whitaker (Narrator): “Every volcano as we learned has its own personality… the volcano Grímsvötn is hidden beneath a glacier making it almost impossible to monitor. So seismologist Kristen Jones and her European Partners tried something new burying a coil of fiber optic cables in the ice cap.
Kristen Jones (Researcher): 'The cable we used was only four millimeters thick and so thin they're actually thinner than a human hair. Yeah it's a bit funny you know it's like you're trenching a very 13 kilometer long hair along a volcano.
Bill Whitaker (Narrator): They devised a makeshift trenching sled to bury the cables to try to pick up volcanic tremors. It worked. Where regular seismometers barely registered a pulse the fiber optic cable showed Grímsvötn as grumbling irritably inside its icy tomb.
Kristen Jones (Researcher): It could be a game changer. We found 100 times more earthquates with this fiber… To be able to understand the volcanoes and the plumbing system you know just being able to seeing this high definition picture that we were not able to see before. And this is just standard cable.
Bill Whitaker (Narrator): The cable that we use for bringing television into our homes!
Kristen Jones (Researcher): Exactly…
The future of IoT and connected cities starts with data collection and data management. Getting the most accurate data will likely be how we generate the cities and living spaces of the future.
Monetization: Sales of data to governments, businesses, insurance companies, or non-profits.
Contributed by: Michael Bervell (Billion Dollar Startup Ideas)