It may just be a fancy ad campaign for its consulting services, but IBM’s TheSmarterCity web application and Smarter Planet page are pretty mesmerizing. Click around to whatever your urban steeze is, listen to some entrancing voice-overs, and end up with a collection of policy papers for dessert. If you are a large institution or small government, you might even want to hire IBM to set up a computing cloud or networked hardware system. Just try not to think about the state of Pepco infrastructure afterwards.

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