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.

Update, Corporate Cities

Briefly, I wanted to update my last post Corporate Cities. Since writing, I discovered a couple similar ventures that I thought I’d note here. First is the Philips Livable Cities Award. Philips wants to promote health and well-being in cities, and they’re doing this by offering 3 grants totaling €125,000. They’re collecting simple ideas from [...]

New York City Aims to Improve the Lives of Elderly

The challenges associated with growing old in some of the world’s largest, fastest, most-intimidating cities are not new. Crumbling side-walks, inaccessible public restrooms, stoplights that favor cars over pedestrians are problems that can be found in most modern 21st century cities.

Corporate Cities

We are all familiar with the budget troubles facing cities today. School closures, transit cuts, and staff layoffs are all par for the course. The housing bubble burst sending the economy into a tailspin; people earned (and spent) less and cities were left without much needed tax revenue. Fortunately, some companies have found this situation [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Auction for Electricity

Imagine if utility companies were separate from utility vendors. Then imagine that those vendors fought for your dollar on the open market, in an auction. You could likely get electricity (and other utilities) a lot cheaper. That’s what Powershop envisions and is seeking to create. An arm of Meridian Energy, the largest electricity generator in [...]

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