SMART CITIES LIVE

The Swedish Energy Agency has granted Bzzt AB a project grant of SEK 7.5 million for the development of the company's operations, technology and software. The project support will be used to further develop the company's mobility system and make it ready for profitable, international expansion. A large part of all journeys made in major international cities are shorter than five kilometers. Only in Stockholm about 350 million short trips are made each year, of which just over

Together with Korea Smart Card, Seoul will introduce the country’s first ‘AI Taxi System’ which grafts the AI technology of the Fourth Industrial Revolution onto Seoul taxis. The system is a new attempt that gathers taxi drivers to areas in which taxi demand is expected to be high. It is anticipated that this will improve the imbalance of supply and demand, which was one factor that made it difficult to catch a taxi. The ‘AI Taxi System’ added even those variables that influe

StadshubbsAlliansen was founded by Öresundskraft in 2017 and currently comprises more than 40 Swedish municipalities. With a strong tradition of collaboration and by offering the same open digital infrastructure as via fiber networks, the members of the StadshubbsAlliansen continue to contribute to more sustainable digitization of society. A Stadshubb is a wireless infrastructure that with the help of the IoT technology LoRaWAN TM makes it possible to capture radio signals fr

Big data, artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of things create the conditions for a development of the smart city of the future. Through a unique research collaboration via partnership between Stockholm City, KTH - The Royal Institute of Technology and MIT - Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the city will gain an in-depth understanding of socio-economic and environmental challenges in the growing city. Stockholm is a city in strong development with a rapidly gr

Thomas Reynaud, Iliad Group’s Chief Executive Officer, and Ambroise Fayolle, Vice-President of the European Investment Bank (EIB) – the bank of the European Union – today celebrated 10 years of partnership by setting up a new €300 million loan, supported by the European Commission’s Investment Plan for Europe (the “Juncker Plan”), to help expand Iliad’s fiber network in France. The financing agreement was signed today 25 meters underground, in an old nuclear bunker transforme

All 54 actions under the plan launched in 2015 have now been delivered or are being implemented. This will contribute to boost Europe's competitiveness, modernise its economy and industry to create jobs, protect the environment and generate sustainable growth. The European Commission today published a comprehensive report on the implementation of the Circular Economy Action Plan it adopted in December 2015. The report presents the main results of implementing the action plan

BT has secured a contract with Northumbrian Water, the providers of reliable and sustainable water, to help deliver a Smart Water project across its North East operating area. BT is providing the low power network and data which will enable operational insights, allowing the water company to better understand how its water network performs using the Internet of Things (IoT). The Smart Water project aims to provide Northumbrian Water with a wide range of insights to allow the

SimplePay, an electronic payments innovator headquartered in Sydney, Australia, has secured an initial $5m USD from Fluce Capital and Versatile Group. This initial amount is part of a private placement round to raise growth capital to continue to accelerate SimplePay's business model, where they already work with over 500+ cities around the world. SimplePay a fast growing technology business provides a unified payment layer that connects  payments infrastructure that enables

Stockholm has an ambitious objective to become the world’s smartest city by the year 2040, creating the best quality of life for its citizens and the best climate for business entrepreneurs. The definition of a “smart” city is subject to some debate but there seem to be three main factors in play: - The use of a wide range of digital technologies to transform life and working environments within the region - The more efficient use of its physical infrastructure (transport, bu

I am sure you have all seen the then and now photo of Dubai comparing what it was like in 1991 and 2017. The transformation has been like no other and all of this has happened in just 27 years. Pretty impressive. The city has grown from what was essentially a dessert in 1990 into one of the most architecturally stunning cities on the planet. In 2014 Smart Dubai was launched with the aim of putting Dubai on the smart city map, in 2014 the city was sitting in #28 place on the c

Procurement is one of the most important aspects to any investment that a city makes, whether it be complex smart city development or a simpler procurement of office furniture. Private sector organisations have whole departments that are dedicated to procurement, making sure that the right deal is struck by the company when purchasing any product. Such skills are not always available on the same scale in the public sector, but the procurement of products is no less important.

A smart city is one that puts people at the centre of development, incorporates Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in urban management and uses these elements as tools to stimulate the formation of an efficient government that includes processes of collaborative planning and citizen participation. These are some of the ways smart cities implement open data policies and citizen participation through technology to improve the quality of life and government effecti

Last week we published an article on how cities and municipalities could make use of existing lighting infrastructure to aid their smart city development. The article generated a lot of interest, so we thought we would follow it up with a practical case study from a County Council in the UK that is in the process of implementing smart street lights. Nowadays most cities have invested in the installation of street lighting, but only a small percentage of these use LED, others

Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, opened London Tech Week with a speech this week in which he stated his aim to make London the smartest city in the world. That is quite an ambition and I am sure that leaders from Amsterdam, Barcelona, Copenhagen, New York, Dubai and other leading smart cities would have something to say about. In fact, London is already classified as one of the smartest cities in the world, but to take that step to becoming the smartest is a lot easier said than

Do you remember the most famous Nokia phone? The one that seemed it could survive everything, including a possible zombie apocalypse? That phone is part of my childhood and many others I am sure. Nokia has now settled at being good at what is supposed to: technology. Nowadays, the Nordic tech-giant is looking into smart cities implementation. Its first move was to develop a platform called IMPACT aka Intelligent Management Platform for All Connected Things, so to serve in the

Cluj Napoca is one of most forward thinking cities in Romania, often called the Silicon Valley of Eastern Europe due to its large IT industry. Its ambition to become a genuine smart city started to drive the interest of both citizens and entrepreneurs, two categories that require authorities to be more open and transparent in their governance. In the majority of cases, a smart city strategy includes the idea of transparent governance, involving different stakeholders in the d

Romania has had a lot of difficulties in the past. And some of the people in it are still haunted by the memories of communism, but while some cities still continue to dwell on the past, there are others who have refused to and are looking into the future. The smart city concept is slowly entering the South-Eastern European country, with some cities already making relevant progress. Today, we are going to talk about the city of Cluj, which has recently launched an app which h

Forum Virium, the innovation unit of Helsinki City Group, announced in a press release its new SynchroniCity project, which took off at the beginning of 2017 and will run through until 2019. SynchroniCity is an initiative aiming at delivering a digital single market for smart cities for Europe and beyond, enabled by Internet of Things technology. The aim is to engage citizens in real-life pilots, where IoT enables new solutions like improved route planning – taking into accou

Cyber attacks are the main drawback of installing an operations technology (OT) infrastructure – 59 percent of cyber security managers believe there is greater risk in OT than IT environments. A recent Ponemon Institute survey discovered nearly 70 percent of organisations sampled suffered a security compromise over the past 12 months resulting in loss of confidential information or operational disruption in their OT environments. The European IT service provider, T-Systems se

Grand Prize of the Startup Space Pitch competition at the Satellite 2017 Awards Reception went to Astrapi Corporation for its innovative technology and business strategy. Astrapi entered the competition with Spiral Modulation, an innovative approach providing satellite communications service providers with dramatic spectral efficiency gains, new coherent interference mitigation techniques and power optimization flexibility in order to meet their customers’ increasing demand f