Topic: smart-cities

On the 15^th of July, 2021, the German Federal Ministry of the Interior, Building and Home Affairs (BMI) announced the winning cities of the third season of German “Smart Cities Model Projects”. This exciting scheme provides funding to assist selected cities with their digital transformation strategies and smart city projects. The scheme first began in 2019, where 13 German cities were selected for funding. In 2020, the project expanded to provide funding to 32 selected cities, to a total of 820 million Euros.

If you plan on providing your services to a government agency, there are a number of things you need to know. Depending on the size, scale, and cost of the project, there are different routes that prospective companies will have to navigate.

Tendering is a form of government procurement or purchasing that involves an authority inviting bidders to submit applications to provide their services. It’s a bidding process that involves government decision-makers selecting the most appropriate bid that provides the best and most cost-effective solution to a problem.

Artificial intelligence (AI) promises huge advantages for smart data processing and automation, potentially affecting every area of our daily lives and influencing the planning and implementation of smart city projects across all six fields of action; however, the creation of AI also poses some important questions. If we relinquish the administrative control of certain processes and services to AI, how can we ensure that they will be inclusive? What will the future labor market look like, and what implications will machine intelligence have for education? Policymakers in particular need to keep ahead of the curve and form a standard legal framework in order for cities to make the most of what AI has to offer.

Winning a smart city tender isn’t a matter of luck. It’s a matter of skilled planning, careful estimations, honest evaluations, a trustworthy relationship, and a solution that ultimately solves the city’s problem.

Government contracts are lucrative contracts, but they’re not easy to land. The competition can be fierce, and unless you’re armed with the proper knowledge, the right product, and a good strategy, your proposal will fall flat before the decision-makers have even had the time to look at it. It’s a sad reality, but it’s true.

As 2019 drew to a close, the travel and tourism industry had reasons to celebrate. The World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC), IBTM Events, and the UN World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) all announced the good news. But then the Covid-19 pandemic dealt a serious blow to the tourism sector.

On the ­8^th of September 2020, Horst Seehofer, Federal Minister of the Interior, Building and Community, announced the decision that 32 Smart City Model Projects will be funded with around 350 million Euros in the second round of the national funding programme "Smart City Model Projects". In the first round of last year, 13 Smart Cities were selected and funded with the aim of accelerating urban digital transformation in Germany.

Law enforcement has been using technology to solve crimes for more than a century. Using technology to prevent crimes, however, is a relatively new idea. The movie Minority Report famously depicts a futuristic society in which police officers arrest people before they commit crimes. It’s a deeply disturbing movie with a not-too-subtle message about the danger of relying too heavily on technology.

Nevertheless, a small industry has emerged around the practice of predictive policing. New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, New Orleans and other cities have experimented with predictive policing programs. The experiments have been inconclusive and controversial. 

The importance of smart cities & smart citizens: In our new interview series, smart city leaders comment on the future of smart cities, the role of technology, and the benefits for citizens. In our first interview of the series, we have asked Jonathan Reichental, CIO of Palo Alto, California to share his expertise, thoughts and insights with us on a number of important smart city topics.

As we discussed in our previous article (Blockchain: The Next Frontier of Smart Cities - Part 1), blockchain has the potential to transform our communities, making the places we call home more collaborative, democratic and sustainable places. It is no surprise then, that a whole bunch of cities - from Santiago de Chile, Toronto, Tel Aviv, Oslo, and Milan, to London, and Stockholm - are already developing blockchain-based projects. Dubai is going even further, aiming to become the world’s first fully ‘blockchain-powered city’ by 2020. Lofty ideals aside, as we examined in part 1, blockchain does actually seem to offer some concrete benefits for communities, as we shall see below.

Blockchain is a hot topic. Until very recently, it was associated almost exclusively with cryptocurrency - bitcoin, ethereum etc. However, the power of blockchain to revolutionize the way we exchange goods and services, and transform how we govern - above and beyond the cryptocurrency hype - is increasingly being recognized. When it comes to cities, the transformative potential of this technology is enormous. From enabling P2P energy-sharing systems, as in New York’s ‘Transactive Grid’, which allows local residents to generate, buy and sell their own solar energy, to encouraging behavioral change - for instance through SocialCoin’s blockchain and AI-based ‘social good’ currency (see e.g. the Citibeats solution) - and much more - blockchain is offering new opportunities to create more economically, environmentally and socially sustainable communities. As such, blockchain is likely to be an increasingly central enabler of smart city innovation worldwide. In this article, we will explore the potential benefits of blockchain in an urban context.