What if you could write applications to optimize and control the behavior of real devices scattered throughout your city?

Every city contains thousands of devices that could potentially be monitored, controlled, and synchronized intelligently.

Consider traffic lights. With a few lines of code you could ensure that fire trucks never hit a red light on their way to a fire. This would make emergency response times faster and it would probably reduce the number of accidents caused by cars blundering into the paths of speeding fire engines.

You could write a few more lines of code to implement intelligent control of temperature and lights in schools and city offices.

I bet there are plenty of opportunities to optimize your city's water-delivery pumping systems.

Once you start thinking about it, there are hundreds, maybe thousands of benefits to wiring up all the city's monitoring and control systems, and coordinating them in an intelligent manner.

That's the dream of Living PlanIT, which has created Urban Operating System, which is – well, just what it sounds like. An operating system for cities.

I like the thinking behind this idea. The potential for energy savings alone is immense.

I don't know if Living PlanIT has competitors. I'm not even sure an operating system is the right technology for implementing these kinds of solutions. (Once the devices are networked the hard part is done, right? All you need is a simple communications protocol for monitoring and controlling behavior. And such protocols are already abundant in the embedded-systems world.)

But I wish 'em luck. This is an idea whose time has surely come.

And, um...I hope they're putting major thought into security. Because I don't want to be traveling through New York in a taxi when a hacker decides it would be fun to scramble the behavior of the stoplights. Or whatever. Not that hackers would ever do such a disruptive thing, of course.

Web recommendation: A Serbia is a small, poor country with a history that's as complicated as – well, as complicated as the Serbian language. (Don't get me started.) But for such a tiny nation, it's doing incredibly well in sports competitions these days. The latest good news: Serbian women's volleyball team wins European gold. Go Serbia! J.D. says check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He recently relocated to a small town outside Belgrade – stop by if your travels take you through Serbia.