“The primary challenge to building a smart city has nothing to do with pouring concrete and erecting steel beams. It’s knowing better the city’s flows to optimize the city for its inhabitants. It’s turning all of the data that comes streaming in from myriad sources into actionable information,” says Laetitia Gazel Anthoine, founder and CEO of Connecthings, a U.S.-European-based technology and IoT enabling company. It's not as easy as it seems however, the city is dynamic and chaotic like a living organism made up of millions of independent parts. We cannot depend on federal and municipal governments to understand the nuances of city life for its wide variety of inhabitants. Despite all the data, no one group can consider needs and desires of every urban demographic, nor should they be expected to. Such top-down systems simply don’t perform for broad technology rollouts as we have seen before. Only by accessing the power of the people […]