Listen: Making New York a Senior Friendly City

Following up on this month’s New York Time’s article, Brian Lehrer of New York City’s public radio station, WNYC, discusses the challenges of improving cities for the elderly with Linda Gibbs, the deputy mayor of Health and Human Services in NYC. Broadening the conversation a bit from the original New York Times article, the full [...]

Parking 2.0

At Living Labs Global, we’ve already identified several innovations in the arena of automobile parking. These cover solutions such as the Municipality of Copenhagen’s text-based parking spot finding system, Estonia’s parking payment solution emt, The Netherland’s RFID-based parking payment system Park-Line, and Spot-Scout, an eBay-like exchange for renting parking spots. Of all the parking solutions [...]

What is a Mobile Economy? Let’s Look to Africa

In May, the research firm Generator Research published a report in which they projected that the worldwide market for mobile payments will grow to 633.4 billion by 2014; the report was picked up by Gigaom and a number of mobile-savvy blogs, getting enough dissemination to make most entrepreneurs drool over the possibilities for growth and [...]

Composting, New Hampshire

A new green business startup is helping restaurants save money and compost in New England. Inspired by San Francisco’s composting mandate—a law which requires residents to compost biodegradable materials such as produce food scraps– Ryan Bedard recognized the demand for alternative waste disposal services back home in Maine and New Hampshire and founded the company [...]

iPhone Banking

JP Morgan Chase’s new Banking application for the iPhone makes managing your personal finances unimaginably convenient. It may be that the days of rushing to the bank during your lunch hour and spending countless minutes waiting for a teller are over. With Chase’s new application, you can take a photo of any personal check (with [...]

What’s new in Mobile Health?

I’ve rounded up a number of interesting mobile health gadgets that have emerged on the market over the last 6 months. Here are a collection of self-explanatory videos which give us a pretty good glimpse at how these gadgets work and how they can be used. Check them out below: MedApps A mobile outpatient monitoring [...]

Mobile Phones as Virtual Wallets

Our mobile society may be trending towards a a time when mobile phones serve as our wallets, too. The video above demonstrates an application released by PayPal this past March. I know, paying with one’s mobile phone isn’t entirely novel on the global scale; from mobile metering to mobile ticketing, many forward-thinking places have integrated [...]

Cell Phones Help Bring Basic Sanitation to Africa

It is predicted that by 2015, 2.7 billion people will lack access to sanitation—this is an especially disheartening figure if you consider that, today, more people have access to mobile phones than toilets. Optimistically, however, a number of innovators around the world are attempting to use this new found access to technology to address the [...]

Museum Mobile Phone Apps

In the current issue of Museum Practice, a journal that focuses on trends in curatorial practices, Simon Stevens presents us with an informed perspective on the costs and benefits associated with implementing mobile applications in the museum-going experience. The premise of this piece is that it may serve many museums well to pause and think [...]

Toxin Sensing Mobile Phones

Researchers at the University of California San Diego have just finished the first phase of an initiative to develop a mobile sensor capable of detecting toxic chemicals in our environment. With a small startup called Rhevision Inc., the chief researcher on the project, Michael Sailor, has devised the sensor, a porous flake of silicon which [...]

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