UBM's 14 Business Units Join Forces to Launch UBM Future Cities, a Community for Innovation in Global Urbanization

NEW YORK, Oct. 15, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- UBM has announced the launch of UBM Future Cities (http://www.ubmfuturecities.com), a global online community for industry leaders and decision makers concerned with building, supporting, and designing the world's cities of the future. This initiative, led by UBM DeusM, is the first-ever venture to be launched as a joint project across UBM's 14 global business units.

More than 150 of the world's leading experts in urbanization and city building have signed on as guest bloggers for the Future Cities community, including: Xavier Trias, Mayor of Barcelona; Steve Lewis, CEO of Living PlanIT; Angela Brady, President of RIBA; Dan Mathieson, Mayor of Stratford, Ontario; Bill Limond, CIO of London; John Tolva, CTO of Chicago; Mathieu Lefevre, Executive Director of the New Cities Foundation; Lee Leffingwell, Mayor of Austin, Texas; Jane Henley, CEO of the World Green Building Council; Kian-Keong Chin, Chief Engineer of Transportation, LTA, Singapore; and Rick Robinson, IBM Executive Architect for Smarter Cities, among others.

The site will feature discussions around the subject of rapid urbanization and the urgent need to build new cities and retrofit old ones in a sustainable manner. A fully multimedia portal, UBM Future Cities will feature blog content, as well as video blogs, live video and audio shows, infographics, live chat discussions with urbanization experts, and more.

Nicole Ferraro, previously Editor in Chief of Internet Evolution, DeusM's largest community, has been named Editor in Chief of UBM Future Cities.

"By 2050, it's projected that 70 percent of the world's population will live in cities," says Ferraro. "There's an immediate need to have a global dialogue about building sustainable, livable cities of the future. And the 150 experts we've enlisted thus far to write for this site recognize that UBM is in the perfect position to host this conversation and to build a vibrant community around this critical subject."

The site launches in partnership with the Municipal Art Society of New York (MAS) and the Centre for London. UBM Future Cities is multi-sponsored, with backing from Dell, Intel, Microsoft, Schneider Electronics, Red Hat, OpenText, Avnet, and Fiberlink.

Contact
Amy Averbook
UBM DeusM Marketing Director
(917) 743-2693
[email protected]

About UBM DeusM
UBM DeusM (www.deusm.com) is an integrated marketing services company owned by UBM plc, targeting the fastest growing segment of the online publishing industry: business social media. The company is led by Managing Director Stephen Saunders, Min's Marketer of the Year 2010. He and the other UBM DeusM principals have built and delivered more than thirty successful sites and online communities over the last 2 years. UBM DeusM's service is based on a unique platform, called Community in a Box (CiaB), which employs a structured system of proven B2B Web publishing best-practices, combined with a breakthrough integrated multimedia publishing platform ("n-Server") to enable marketers to quickly and profitably set up specialized communities for their target customers.

About UBM plc
UBM plc is a leading global business media company. We inform markets and bring the world's buyers and sellers together at events, online, in print and provide them with the information they need to do business successfully. We focus on serving professional commercial communities, from doctors to game developers, from journalists to jewellery traders, from farmers to pharmacists around the world. Our 6,000 staff in more than 30 countries are organised into specialist teams that serve these communities, helping them to do business and their markets to work effectively and efficiently. For more information, go to www.ubm.com 

SOURCE UBM DeusM