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 [...]

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 [...]

Trials

People in the tech world always talk about “iterating” – a process by which a solution is tried, tested, and improved upon incrementally until the best solution is found. It’s a useful and efficient process, specifically suitable to tech companies. The technology they create (and use) is fast and has been developed precisely for this [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

World Cup Apps

In the spirit of the World Cup Season, I thought I’d point you football fans out there to a number of useful, and appropriately distracting World Cup Mobile Applications which can keep you informed whether you’re stuck in the office. Here are some of my top picks: 1) ESPN’s 2010 FIFA World Cup app is [...]

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 [...]

SpectioNZ Converts Waste to Energy

SpectioNZ, a clean tech company based out of Wellington, New Zealand, has developed a process for converting organic waste (like human feces) and plastic into energy. Currently operating out of the business incubator CreativeHQ, SpectioNZ is testing a trial converter at the Paraparaumu wastewater treatment plant. At the treatment plant, dehydrated waste is mixed with [...]

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