Using smart city technology to power local economic development | SmartBrief. As mayors and city managers work to capture revenue from non-tax sources, strategic use of technology will become increasingly important. The mainstreaming of SmartCity technology is creating unprecedented opportunities for civic leaders to improve quality of life through cost effective initiatives in the areas of economic development, civic engagement and digital inclusion. How do you define a ‘smart city’? Fundamentally, smart cities use technology and process innovation to improve the quality of life for all stakeholders within a community. One could make the case that thanks to broad adoption of SmartPhone technology and broadband wireless, most cities are already ‘smart.’ However, so far, it is the private sector that is leading. City management is responding rather than proactively initiating a coherent strategy for harnessing smart technology in a way that improves quality of life for residents and visitors.
Let’s start at the most fundamental level. The New Way to Build Brilliant Product Roadmaps | Aha! Public Wi-Fi. In our increasingly digital age, people use...and expect...social media and the internet on the go. Free Wi-Fi coverage in a town centre can really help residents and tourists connect with each other and stay in touch with local events, while local businesses can benefit from the added attraction of free Wi-Fi and the potential advertising derived from it. Many businesses in your town centre, particularly cafes, pubs and hotels, probably offer free Wi-Fi already to attract customers, but also because their customers expect it. The same could be said for town centres. Developing a 'bricks & clicks' environment can really add another layer of interaction between a town centre and its users; as getting online is now becoming an important part of the shopping experience, developing a local website or Wi-Fi portal for people to login via provides another advertising opportunity for local services to connect with people.
Untitled. Public Wi-Fi. Untitled. UK Mobile Media discuss the Mansfield public Wi-Fi installation - UK Mobile MediaUK Mobile Media. Mansfield Free Wi-Fi Project. Www.rnetso.net. Kendal Town Centre Wifi. Kendal’s free town centre WiFi is brought to you by our Economic Development team. The pilot WiFi scheme is the first of its type in the South Lakes area and may be introduced into more towns and villages if successful. Other WiFi schemes have been launched in various towns and cities across the UK and have proved very popular. The WiFi is now live and we continue to work with appointed contractors WiFi Sparks Ltd on its upkeep and maintenance. Please revisit this page to find out the latest updates.
How does it work? You can access the WiFi along the main shopping routes in the town centre. Please see Kendal WiFi coverage map (JPG/1 MB) to see exactly which streets are included. What are the benefits? Improved speed and accessibility of internet in Kendal town centre, avoiding any data charges a new welcome screen, allowing users to easily find shops, restaurants, attractions, events, offers and services in the town. What’s the cost? What will happen to any revenue generated? How Remote Places Can Get Cellular Coverage by Doing It Themselves. With Swedish telephone numbers and a tree-bound base station, a remote Indonesian village runs its own telecommunications company. A four-hour drive from the nearest cellular coverage in the remote highlands of Papua, Indonesia, a new kind of guerilla telecom network is operating, albeit outside the law, using a cheap base station roped into a treetop.
The technology could provide a new model for self-managed “last mile” mobile coverage in the world’s hardest-to-reach areas, where traditional top-down telecommunications business models don’t work. The project was set up by a team from the University of California, Berkeley. The resulting network is now operated by a tiny stand-alone telecommunications company run by a local NGO, with a laptop for local billing and a satellite connection to the rest of the world. “It’s a telco-in-a-box that we put in a tree,” says Kurtis Heimerl, a developer at Range Networks and grad student at UC Berkeley who led the project. What Founders Need to Know: You Were Funded for a Liquidity Event – Start Looking. There are many reasons to found a startup. There are many reasons to work at a startup. But there’s only one reason your company got funded. Liquidity. The Good NewsTo most founders a startup is not a job, but a calling. But startups require money upfront for product development and later to scale.
Traditional lenders (banks) think that startups are too risky for a traditional bank loan. Luckily in the last quarter of the 20th century a new source of money called risk capital emerged. Founders can now access the largest pool of risk capital that ever existed –in the form of Private Equity (Angel Investors, family offices, Venture Capitalists (VC’s) and Hedge Funds.)
At its core Venture Capital is nothing more than a small portion of the Private Equity financial asset class. The Bad NewsWhile startups are driven by their founder’s passion for creating something new, startup investors have a much different agenda – a return on their investment. Why don’t VCs tell founders this fact? Open Garden — Here's how to show VCs what your competition looks like | VentureBeat | Entrepreneur | by Steve Blank. Steve Blank is a retired serial entrepreneur and has been a founder or participant in eight Silicon Valley startups since 1978. This article originally appeared on his blog. Every startup I see invariably puts up a competitive analysis slide that plots performance on a X/Y graph with their company in the top right. Above: Traditional competitive analysis slide Image Credit: Steve Blank The slide is a holdover from when existing companies launched products into crowded markets. The X/Y axis competitive analysis slide is a used by existing companies who plan to enter into an existing market.
This slide typically shows some price/performance advantage. But today most startups are trying to ressegment existing markets or create new markets. We need a different way to represent the competitive landscape when you are creating a business that never existed or taking share away from incumbents by resegmenting an existing market. Here’s how. Above: Your startup at the center Above: Show capital raised. The New Way to Build Brilliant Product Roadmaps | Aha! Amazon Books: 4 months later, the retail giant's bricks-and-mortar experiment feels like a winner. Amazon has almost perfected a shopping experience for browsers — and I mean human, not web.
Four months after the first Amazon Books physical store opened in Seattle’s University Village, Amazon appears to be satisfied enough with the results to move forward with a second location in San Diego. But is the original just a novelty, attracting only nerdy tourists? Or does it work as a retail store for people who truly want to browse and buy? From what I saw — and purchased — on my recent visit, Amazon has nailed what it takes to have a successful retail store in an e-commerce world.
Any kind of retail store. I’ve long been skeptical about the artificial separation between online and physical retailing. Since then, “showrooming” has become a dirty word in retail, reflecting customers who check out products in a store and then buy them cheaper, online. Why does Amazon Books work, beyond the novelty of seeing the Amazon name IRL? Encourages browsing and serendipity. Removes “better deal” fears. The Data Explosion Makes Storage Tech Exciting.
Photo Data storage has never exactly been a topic that lights up a conversation, unlike, say Twitter flame wars or even the business application programming interfaces for enterprise manufacturing management software written by the German software giant SAP. But that could finally be changing. Pure Technology, a Silicon Valley company, has created a storage “box” that looks a bit like a refrigerator and can store the equivalent of billions of books. It is one of a number of storage innovations to come out of the tech industry in recent years that are designed to deal with an explosion of data generated by websites, smartphones and sensors on everything from roadways to appliances. IBM estimates that by 2020 all those devices will generate 44 zettabytes of data. That’s a thousandfold number up from exabytes. That is equal to about 1,100 of Pure’s new boxes, which hold 16 petabytes of data, roughly equal to 16 billion thick books. In other words — a lot.
Plenar.io - A spatio-temporal open data platform. Netgear Nighthawk X4S Review. Lots of people complain about Wi-Fi, but very few do anything about it. If you’re serious about taking action, there are more and more high-end routers on the market that make powerful coverage and high speeds possible. Netgear’s Nighthawk X4S gaming router is for exactly that sort of person. At $260, it’s not cheap, but that money gives you an 802.11ac router with combined bandwidth of up to 2.53Gbps. Four antenna and MU-MIMO capability means it can handle large houses, at least in theory. The X4S can’t match the $400 Netgear Nighthawk X8, which we reviewed earlier this year, for performance – it offers speeds of up to 5.3Gbps. An alien probe for your living room There are routers designed to be subtle, and then there’s the Nighthawk X4S.
Wherever you put this router, it’s going to take up a fair bit of space. Bill Roberson/Digital Trends The LED lights on the Nighthawk X4S are bright, to the point where I occasionally went to bed thinking I’d left the lamp on downstairs. In-Memory Data Fabric - GridGain. The GridGain in-memory computing platform delivers unprecedented speed and unlimited scale to data-intensive applications with a memory-centric architecture which leverages ongoing advancements in memory and storage technologies to provide distributed in-memory computing performance with the cost and durability of disk storage.
Users can achieve a 1,000x or more increase in performance while scaling out to petabytes of in-memory data across a cluster of commodity servers. GridGain enables high-performance ACID transactions, real-time streaming and fast analytics in a single, comprehensive data access and processing layer. GridGain spans all key languages (Java, SQL, .NET, C++) and data stores (RDBMS, NoSQL, Hadoop) while offering ACID transactions and ANSI SQL-99 compliance.
GridGain Software Editions The GridGain Professional Edition is a binary build of Apache Ignite™ which includes optional LGPL dependencies, such as Hibernate L2 cache integration and Geospatial Indexing. Adobe Experience Designer (XD) aims to make life easier for UI and UX designers. Adobe has been teasing a state-of-the-art User Experience (UX) design and prototyping tool under the name Project Comet, seemingly forever. It is finally ready to take the covers off and release a public preview of the tool, which has been christened Adobe Experience Designer CC (XD for short). Rather than positioning it to completely replace any of its existing tools for developers, Adobe is carving out a new niche, with XD providing an easy-to-use, lightweight, application for UI and UX designers to create and wire together interfaces for the Web, desktop, and mobile platforms. XD shines in easy asset placement and interaction prototyping XD is absolutely positioned a solution for frustrated designers tired of having to drag out Illustrator, Photoshop, and Dreamweaver every time they want to create and wire up an interface that includes raster assets, vector assets, and screen-to-screen navigation.
XD supports a variety of asset formats, including SVG for creating scalable interfaces. KC installs first of 25 Smart City kiosks downtown. Two new 7-foot-tall kiosks, looking something like giant iPhones, were installed Monday morning in downtown Kansas City, just in time for the Big 12 tournament. The two kiosks, in the 1300 block of Grand Boulevard, are the first of what will be 25 kiosks along and near the downtown streetcar route. They are designed to give residents and visitors access to all sorts of information about downtown activities, entertainment and services. “This will be the first physical manifestation of what we’re calling the Smart City initiative,” said city spokesman Chris Hernandez. “And what’s cool about these kiosks is they will help you figure out what you can do in downtown Kansas City.” Thirteen of the kiosks will be at platforms along the downtown Kansas City streetcar route, and 12 will be on nearby streets. There will also be a 911 button to report emergencies and ways to report problems with city services to the 311 Action Center.
Array of Things. KCMO Innovate (@KCMOInnovation) | Twitter. The New Way to Build Brilliant Product Roadmaps | Aha! Stream-processing with Mantis. Back in January of 2014 we wrote about the need for better visibility into our complex operational environments. The core of the message in that post was about the need for fine-grained, contextual and scalable insights into the experiences of our customers and behaviors of our services. While our execution has evolved somewhat differently from our original vision, the underlying principles behind that vision are as relevant today as they were then. In this post, we’ll share what we’ve learned building Mantis, a stream-processing service platform that’s processing event streams of up to 8 million events per second, and running hundreds of stream-processing jobs around the clock. We’ll describe the architecture of the platform and how we’re using it to solve real-world operational problems.
Why Mantis? There are more than 75 million Netflix members watching 125 million hours of content every day in over 190 countries around the world. A Deeper Dive Architecture Overview Mantis Jobs. Team - Code First: Girls. Ad:tech London | The event for digital marketing. How to succeed as a technology start-up. There has been a lot of debate recently around female entrepreneurship and the reasons why there are so few women in technology. One woman who is at the fore of UK technology, and who has publicly called for other women to get involved in tech, is Sarah Wood.
Co-founder and co-CEO of video advertising technology (adtech) business Unruly, Wood has been voted UK Female Entrepreneur of the Year, named one of the 10 London-based ‘Entrepreneurs to Watch’ by Forbes, and was awarded the title of Digital Woman of the Year by Red Magazine. Her business Unruly has been named the UK’s second fastest growing technology company for its success in delivering powerful social video campaigns, and was acquired by Murdoch’s News Corp for £114m in September of this year.
Speaking at a recent fireside talk hosted by Startup Grind London, Wood discussed her journey to-date as a female entrepreneur, the challenges she has faced and how she has overcome them. “It’s a lot about the learning curve. Urban.Us Event. Lamppost shines a light on smart cities. Bosch and their take on the Internet of Things | Automotive Industry Interview | just-auto. The Bosch Connected World event in Berlin is an industry invitation-only gathering. It's fast-becoming a sought-after Internet of Things (IoT) prediction machine and this year's proved no different with the announcement of Bosch's IoT private cloud solution.
Kit Fordson spoke with Dr Rainer Kallenbach, the Chairman of the Executive Board of Bosch Software Innovations, to get more insight. just-auto: You've launched your IoT cloud today. I understand there's only going to be a single data centre in Stuttgart. Dr Rainer Kallenbach: We don't disclose the details obviously. J-a: So there's not necessarily going to be one data centre… RK: We can't disclose how it's done. J-a: So you already have the infrastructure in place? RK: We already have most of the infrastructure. J-a: Does that mean you're more selective about the data that you're going to store/process/analyse? RK: We are selective with respect to other questions, but not for sizing our storage. RK: I would not discuss it as either/or. London leads the way in the global growth of 'smart cities'