Smart Cities
A Tale of Two Smart City Approaches: Toronto & Barcelona
August 8th, 2019“It’s a Data Center with a Glass Roof” – Cannabis Pushes the Boundaries of Smart Buildings
July 31st, 2019Energy Harvesting: Scalable Renewable Energy for the IoT
“In the long term, battery technology will not be able to meet the demand being created by the expansion of internet of things (IoT) applications,” James Myers, director of devices and circuits at UK chipmaker Arm’s research and development division. The firm estimates that if each of the trillion or so wireless sensor nodes that […]
A Data-Enabled Logistics City with Blockchain at its Heart
“Truly innovative projects are those that allow access of all agents of the ecosystem to the most modern technologies and exponents, in all its forms. This is what we are building at the Polo Multimodal: through the use of innovative engineering we will promote the true social revolution,” states Polo Multimodal, the firm building a […]
Google’s Sidewalk Labs is Building a Building Factory in Toronto
When Google’s sister company, Sidewalk Labs, “released” its leaked master plan for the Toronto quayside development it was met with mixed reviews. For those staunchly against increased corporate involvement in public spaces and urban planning, and for those who adore anything Google does, minds were already made up before the plans emerged. However, most people […]
The Future of Digital Technology in Cities, According to the Urban Land Institute
“The adoption of digital technologies will change the face of cities as surely as any previous technology, whether the railway, the car or the skyscraper,” states a recent report from the Urban Land Institute (ULI). “However, rather than one huge ‘meteor strike’ impact, digital will create many individual heterogeneous changes, clustered into trends that, collectively, […]
‘We’ Don’t Sell Flexible Office Space, ‘We’ Sell Modern Urban Lifestyles
WeWork has created a lot of buzz with its flexible contracts and millennial-hipster style branding for what is essentially a “Regus-esque” office real-estate play. Its sister firms in the education and residential spaces have not troubled the stance of critical investment experts who have sometimes painted WeWork as the symbol of over-funding in the startup […]
DHL & EHang Launch First Regular Drone Delivery Service in China
DHL Express and intelligent autonomous aerial vehicle (drone) company EHang have launched a regular drone delivery route to overcome last mile delivery issues in urban China. The new customized route, which has been exclusively created for a single DHL customer, covers a distance of approximately eight kilometers between the customer premises and the DHL service […]
Buildings Consume Too Much Energy. We Need Stronger Regulation. “There’s No Time to Waste”
History is unfortunately full of examples of building and construction legislation that came too late. The use of combustible cladding offers several recent examples, including the London’s Grenfell Tower fire which killed 72 people, or the fires in Melbourne’s Lacrosse Tower and Neo200 building just this February. Combustible cladding on a tower block is an […]
Freelance Work Culture is Laying the Foundations for the Virtual Office
There are more than 53 million freelancers workers in the US, making up 34% of the national workforce according to a Freelancers Union report. Freelancers log more than one billion work hours per week and bring an estimated $715 billion in earnings into the US economy. Twice as many freelancers have seen an increase in […]