The synchronized ballet of traffic light adjustments that turned Los Angeles into a parking lot, helping Mark Wahlberg and Charlize Theron escape with an armored truck full of cash in The Italian Job, is no longer the stuff of Hollywood legend.
The tech behind it is already rolling on the installation trucks of companies like Silver Spring Networks, which is snapping up municipal contracts from Copenhagen to California, installing smart street lights and utility meters that beam data back to headquarters, enabling energy savings and reducing costs.
The 15-year-old company is using a planned community under construction near Denver to demonstrate how a smart street light network can do everything from offering free Wi-Fi to alerting motorists when a parking space opens up. Theoretically, the lights could be the target of an Italian Job-style hack, too, but that’s not likely, according to Silver Spring CEO Mike Bell.
“We take a common sense approach to security,” he said in an interview at CES on Wednesday. There are 25 million Silver Spring sensors all over the world, and their military-grade security…