Wednesday, May 4, 2016

Is using apps to build Smart Cities possible?


Nowadays everything in our life can become "smart", there are smartphones, smart-fridges, smart-desks, smart-bracelets, smart-watches, and so on... 

To the point that we start hearing of even smart-cars:



But can there be a Smart City? Or is that where the "smartification" ends.

In deed it seems like the trend is going towards the Smart Cities:

For instance app developers are now using the data recorded by the users of their apps to help (for a price) City Managers in order to make "urban living more manageable, and the more information they have about how people move around in cities, the easier that proposition becomes (source)"

The first city that used this opportunity to make use of this data was Oregon (They paid Strava $20,000 USD for data on 20,000 bikers). But Strava is not the only app doing this, for instance "Ototo"an Israeli startup is trying to do what Waze did for public transportation and therefore to help governments plan they public infrastructure bette.
(Update: Seems like Ototo was bought by an undisclosed company and their service is not longer public) 


There's a lot of things that are being done to "smartify" our cities:

A mathematician in Sweden has developed a new algorithm to predict train delays, and it's already in used, to predict the effect of one or multiple delays in the entire system.


There are also free web apps available, like Streetmix, where users (housing developers, government officials, urban planners, etc) can build better streets to fit their needs.




Do you think we are going to see a surge of "app-designed" cities in the near future?
Pleas lets talk about it in the comments below/


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