Some Cities Don’t Need Corporate Sponsorships

In two previous posts, I’ve highlighted initiatives by several corporations (Pepsi, GE, Philips, KFC, and IBM) to influence better design and function in cities and the services they offer. But, as I discovered after reading a tweet by Portland, Oregon’s Mayor Sam Adams, corporations aren’t the only ones stimulating innovative solutions in cities.

Super Happy Dev House

Along the lines of previous posts on co-working spaces and hackathons, Super Happy Dev House (SHDH) is an occasional meet-up of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and hackers. Past SHDH’s have been held both in donated corporate spaces (like Microsoft and Google), co-working spaces (Sandbox Suites), and at hackers’ homes (the “Rainbow Mansion”). Food and drinks have [...]

Shared Work Spaces

It used to be the norm to spend the hours between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. at your company’s office. It also used to be the norm that you’d spend years of your life doing the same thing, day in and day out, all at the same place. Not true anymore. In cities across the [...]

Random Hacks of Kindness

Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK) was born of a partnership between Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, NASA, and The World Bank. Leaders at these companies know that there are some problems facing the world that should come before business concerns. So now, working with a team of subject matter experts and Crisis Commons, RHoK organizes hackathons that [...]

Mobilizing Education, Africa

In anticipation of the upcoming 5th annual conference on ICT for Development, Education and Training in Zambia at the end of the month, the online news portal eLearning AFria published an insightful interview with John Traxler, a leading thinker and proponent of mobile learning globally. For the purpose of this post, I have included the [...]

Quake Catcher Network

In the wake of the unlucky string of earthquakes around the world, I thought it would be appropriate to write about the Quake-Catcher Network (QCN). QCN is a collaborative initiative for developing the world’s largest, low-cost strong-motion seismic network by utilizing sensors in and attached to internet-connected computers.

Mobile Phones as Sensors for Enhancing Lifestyles

I thought this video (despite being long) provided a fairly thoughtful look at potential use for the data our mobile phones are collecting. If you stick with it, it’s worth it.

SimpleGeo

This week, the New York Times technology blog, Bits, highlighted the technology startup SimpleGeo. SimpleGeo is a small firm which is capitalizing on the scarcity of access to local location data. In recognizing that many mobile games, mobile services and mobile applications are inherently limited by their access to location data, the founders of SimpleGeo [...]

Digital Capital Week, Washington DC

The city and the people that brought us the Apps for Democracy Model for service innovation in 2009, will launch the 2010 Digital Capital Week in June of 2010; The Purpose of Digital Capital Week is to strengthen the capital region’s digital economy via a 10 day series of events focused on creativity, technology, entrepreneurship, [...]

Random Hacks of Kindness, Courtesy of the World Bank

Next week the World Bank is teaming up with Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and NASA to put on their first Random Hacks of Kindness Hackathon, a 3 day programming marathon which aims to develop software solutions for the challenges associated with natural disasters; 150 Programmers will work with disaster relief experts to identify problems and possible [...]