IoT projects will slow down and cities will have to decide if 5G is best for vehicle-to-infrastructure communication, IDC says.

Over the next decade of smart cities work, there will be fewer IoT projects, more citizen input, and more communication between cars and infrastructure, according to the smart cities team at IDC.

City leaders will build digital trust in new technology by setting clear data-use policies as the first step in the technology procurement process.

Although climate change did not appear on the predictions list, Ruthbea Yesner, vice president worldwide government insights at IDC, said it is a huge driver of smart city work.

“Cities are looking at how anything from communications to technology can build community resilience and help them respond and adapt to this changing environment,” Yesner said.

IDC predicts that by 2023 cities and governments will spend $196 billion globally on smart cities work. The biggest spending categories are fixed visual surveillance, public transportation, and smart lighting.

IDC’s 10 predictions for smart cities work in 2020 fall into five main buckets:

• Public safety
• Data use
• Talent issues
• Digital trust
• Macroeconomic impact of technology

The full list is below. The IDC smart cities team discussed predictions 1, 3, 4, and 10 during a recent webinar.

Roadblocks to IoT success

IDC’s predictions start out with a stark description of the challenges many city leaders face with IoT projects: In 2020, 10% to 30% of IoT will fail to launch or scale due to weak performance metrics, poor understanding of products, and lack of funding.

Yesner said that IDC has found that more than 35% of cities have deployed an IoT project while 12% said they had developed but not launched it.

In a survey, city leaders said IoT projects stalled or died because of lack of internal skills, limited budgets, and a lack of understanding of the technology’s benefits. Yesner said there are many roadblocks to success, including a lack of staff and resources.

“Some of these didn’t meet expectations because the outcomes were too broad or not measurable,” she said.

Yesner said that assumptions often didn’t match the reality of how cities work. One example of expectations not matching results is a popular project of converting incandescent street lights to LEDs. Yesner said that because many U.S. cities pay a flat fee for electricity, officials did not see a cost savings for using less electricity.

“You see energy savings from the conversion but you don’t get benefits from programmability and dimming because you’re not adjusting costs based on metered energy,” she said.

Yesner also said that many products from vendors are untested, immature, and oversold.

In a related IoT prediction, IDC thinks that by 2023, 20% of cybersecurity incidents will stem from Smart City IoT device deployments, which will lead to double-digit increases in cybersecurity software and staff training budgets.

Cities need a sensor strategy that addresses use cases, data protection and physical and cybersecurity plans, she said.

More data ethics policies

Alison Brooks, an IDC research vice president for smart cities and communities, said that cities will respond to increasing skepticism around surveillance technology by establishing clear data use policies.

In No. 3, IDC predicts that 75% of next-gen public safety technology procurements will have specifications preemptively scoped by strict policy frameworks. Prediction No. 4 addresses data policies.

Brooks said that residents mostly accept “intelligence everywhere” data collection in a consumer capacity, but not when the state adopts a similar approach. She said that privacy advocates are concerned with the increasingly broad surveillance of citiezen’s daily activities and potential misuse of biometric data.

“This includes social media monitoring, predictive policing, cell-site simulators, automatic number plate recognition, drones, and gun detection,” Brooks said.

To respond to these concerns, cities will start to develop “carefully worded and strictly scoped policy frameworks that delineate acceptable use.” Setting data-use policies should be the first step in the tech purchasing process.

“Policy is going to have to precede tech procurement and IT will have to work with more stakeholders to de-risk implementation,” she said. “Agencies will need to keep project objectives very simple, restricted and measurable.”

Yesner said that cities have to build community engagement into every project to ensure ultimate success and even funding.

“If you’re going out to a bond to pay for this work, part of the funding process becomes engaging and educating the community,” Yesner said.

5G vs. DSRC for vehicle-to-infrastructure communication

IDC’s prediction No. 10 highlights a challenge cities face in making it easy for cars and trucks to communicate with city infrastructure like stop lights, crosswalks, and stop signs.

A few years ago when municipalities started investing in vehicle-to-infrastructure technology (V2I), dedicated short-range communications was a viable choice. Now that 5G is becoming more available, cities are now stuck in the middle of the debate between two standards.

Max Claps, research director of IDC government insights, said that some automakers are split with some using 5G technology—BMW, Mercedes, and Ford— while others including GM and Volkswagen using DSRC.

IDC predicts that by 2025, 25% of major cities worldwide will have picked one standard or the other and installed V2I infrastructure.

“We recommend that cities work closely with regulators and car manufacturers to make sure the eventual road map minimizes the cost of investment,” Claps said.

He said that cities also need to take into account how will services, storage, and apps will need to scale over time.

“Vehicle to infrastructure connectivity is only as good as the data and the content that is transmitted over endpoint to endpoint exchanges,” he said.

Another IDC 5G prediction is that by 2024 75% of all large cities will use 5G to scale key services including real-time crime centers, V2I connectivity, and smart stadiums.

IDC Worldwide Smart Cities and Communities: 2020 Predictions 

1: In 2020, 10%–30% of Smart City IoT projects will fail to launch or scale due to ill-defined outcomes or KPIs, poor understanding of vendor offerings, and/or inadequate funding and stakeholder engagement.

2: By 2021, 20% of cities will use composite indexes to assess the value of initiatives, such as predictive policing, mobility as a service, and personalized care.

3: By 2021, in response to pressure from citizens and advocacy groups, 75% of next-gen public safety technology procurements will have specifications preemptively scoped by strict policy frameworks.

4: By 2022, 50% of large cities will develop data ethics policies that define how and what data can be collected, used, and shared.

5: By 2023, 25% of successful Smart Cities digital twin platforms will be used to automate processes for increasingly complex, interconnected ecosystems of assets and products.

6: By 2023, 20% of cybersecurity incidents will stem from Smart City IoT device deployments, forcing double-digit increases in cybersecurity software and staff training budgets.

7: By 2024, 90% of greenfield cities and 20% of existing cities globally will adopt digital space planning capabilities and new zoning regulations to realize the benefits of the growing sharing economy.

8: By 2024, 70% of city data scientist jobs will be unfilled, resulting in increased investment in robotic process automation and AI-native systems, which will exponentially grow data capabilities without adding headcount.

9: By 2024, one-third of all Smart Cities use cases will be impacted by 5G, and 75% of large cities will use 5G to scale key services such as real-time crime centers, V2I connectivity, and smart stadiums.

10: By 2025, 25% of major cities worldwide will have installed connected vehicle infrastructure using either 5G or DSRC as countries and regions settle on one standard or the other.

Read the article here: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/10-predictions-for-smart-city-priorities-in-2020/?ftag=TRE684d531&bhid=29093001945884924449183221558090

The idea of smart cities was not on anyone’s radar back in 2005, but New Orleans got a head start on data-driven decision making thanks to Hurricane Katrina.

After Katrina hit and the city’s levees failed, the city started using data to improve and speed-up decision making to support the city’s recovery.

Amsterdam was another early adopter with the Amsterdam Smart Cities Initiative in 2009. The team used data to address depression and increase treatment for people who were not getting help. By combining statistics from insurance companies and information about the cost of treatment for depression, the project team found hot spots in the city where people with depression were not receiving appropriate care.

Steph Stoppenhagen, director of smart cities business development solutions at Black & Veatch, said that public private partnerships (P3s) are an effective way to make smart city projects successful.

“That’s where you create those P3s to build a consortium and do this project that way,” she said.

Stoppenhagen said that smart campuses are a growing trend in P3 smart city projects. Sprint recently announced a smart campus project with Arizona State University to take advantage of 5G service. Sprint is working with the university and the Greater Phoenix Smart Region Consortium to create a Sprint 5G incubator at ASU’s Novus Innovation Corridor and conduct joint research and development.

This look back at smart city projects over the last decade highlights what worked and what didn’t.

Successful smart city work

There are many ways to measure what makes a city smart.

IDC is taking nominations for its second annual Smart Cities awards program with 12 categories. In the first round of awards, Albany, NY, won the smart water category and NYCx Co-Labs in Brownsville, Brooklyn, won for digital equity and accessibility.

Easy Park’s second Smart Cities Index scored 500 cities across 24 criteria that cover everything from recycling to blockchain. Vienna won a 10 for trash management and San Francisco got the top mark for blockchain.

In 2017, the What Works Cities division of Bloomberg Philanthropies launched a certification process to evaluate how well cities use data to improve the quality of life for residents. So far, 13 cities have won a gold or a silver certification with two honorable mentions:

• Arlington, TX – Silver in 2019
• Boston, MA – Silver in 2018
• Kansas City, MO – Gold in 2019 and Silver in 2018
• Los Angeles – Gold in 2018
• Louisville, KY – Gold in 2019 and Silver in 2018
• Memphis, TN – Silver in 2019
• New Orleans, LA – Silver in 2018
• Philadelphia, PA – Silver in 2019
• San Diego, CA – Silver in 2018
• San Francisco, CA – Silver in 2018
• Scottsdale, AZ – Silverin 2019
• Seattle, WA – Silver in 2018
• Washington, DC – Gold in 2019 and Silver in 2018

The certification review process has 45 criteria in eight categories:

• Data Governance
• Evaluations
• General Management
• Open Data
• Performance & Analytics
• Repurposing
• Results-Driven Contracting
• Stakeholder Engagement

Louisville won for building an open-source, cloud-based system Waze Analytics Relational-database Platform (Waze WARP). The platform uses WAZE data, collision reports, and built-environment data to conduct real-time traffic studies. More than 900 government entities are now using this platform to run both historic and real-time querying and analysis to improve mobility, pedestrian and bike safety, road conditions, and emergency response.

Washington, DC’s Right Care, Right Now pilot project was designed to route 911 callers to the right kind of help. Operators now transfers callers with non-life-threatening conditions to an EMS-trained nurse, who determines the most appropriate services. The nurse can schedule a same-day appointment at an urgent or primary care facility and coordinates transportation through Lyft.

Earlier this year, Kansas City passed an ordinance to ensure its commitment to data-driven governance and protect the city’s priorities around transparency. One challenge for smart city work is ensuring that data transparency and access survives the transition to a new mayor.

Low points 

American cities faced unintended consequence as a result of one data-driven idea. To improve public transportation in low-income communities, cities started building apartments and condos near transit stops to accomplish this.

Instead of expanding educational and employment opportunities, these developments encouraged gentrification and pushed out the same people the project was designed to help. These new developments often raised rents in poor neighborhoods and priced out the people the transit expansions were meant to serve.

The San Diego Union Tribune studied the developments in four California cities where about 400 multifamily buildings were completed or under construction within a half mile of a transit stop.

In neighborhoods where most families made less than $64,000 a year, the newspaper analysis found that monthly rent for a two-bedroom apartment was more than $3,500. In some areas where median household income was less than $30,000, the average rent on a two-bedroom apartment is still more than $3,300.

Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs led one of the biggest smart city fails in the last decade with Sidewalk Toronto. After several years of discussions, Google released ambitious plans in June 2019 to build residential, retail, and office buildings on Toronto’s waterfront.

The project included public Wi-Fi, in addition to other sensors to collect “urban data” to better inform housing and traffic decisions. By October, Sidewalk Toronto leaders had scaled back their plans due to complaints and questions from residents.

Stoppenhagen said the Sidewalks team had great intentions in Toronto but they didn’t have residents and neighborhood organizations at the table.

“This has a bunch of us learning a lot of lessons out there of always bringing the community to the table to make sure they are aligned with the plan so it doesn’t all blow up in smoke,” she said.

Stoppenhagen added that one of the biggest challenges that cities face is addressing privacy concerns.

“We need a better educational plan to explain why we want to use this data and how that will affect someone in the future to their advantage,” she said. “We need to show some use cases back to the public.”

Community engagement is critical

Bas Boorsma, vice president at Cities Today Institute, has a list of 10 why reasons smart cities projects fail and technology myopia and solutionism are at the top of the list. City leaders fall into these traps when the goal is to implement a new technology instead of using tech to solve a city problem.

This mistake is often a result of a related problem—not talking to residents who are most interested in quality of life issues, like access to an internet connection and potholes. Stoppenhagen said this is the frame of reference she uses for smart city projects.

“When I think smart cities, it means more time back to that citizen, how can we be more efficient and give someone back more time?” she said.

In a column about smart city projects, Kendra L. Smith, the associate director of community engagement in the Center for Population Health Sciences at Stanford University, said smart cities leaders must embrace non-digital issues such as “legacy governance, social justice, politics, ideology, privacy and financial elements that are not so smart, efficient or resilient when smart-city planning starts.”

Smith wrote that to succeed and be relevant to residents, city leaders must answer these questions about smart city projects:

1. Who decides what the city really needs and will operate going forward?
2. What does it really cost to develop a smart city?
3. How will a smart city affect social justice in my city?

The key is to make sure digital goals can withstand the real-world reality check from residents and long-standing city operations.

Read the article here: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/a-decade-of-smart-city-projects-what-worked-and-what-didnt/

At this year’s Smart City Expo World Congress in Barcelona, Microsoft has announced several new features in Azure to accelerate the development and success of smart city solutions.

According to a recent blogpost by Anthony Salcito, interim vice president of public sector at Microsoft, the firm is focusing heavily “to empower cities with the tools they need to engage and connect with their citizens, modernise the government workplace, enhance government and city services, and help improve security.”

Many of the new updates involve Azure Maps. For instance, the cloud solution now uses weather services to give cities an easy way to integrate real-time weather data into their applications. It also integrates with mobility-as-a-service company Moovit and visual assistance app Aira to make public transport more accessible to blind or low-vision users.

Microsoft has also made Azure Maps available on the Azure Government Cloud enabling US government agencies and cities to use geospatial and location intelligence capabilities in their cloud solutions for smart mobility, public safety, emergency management and more.

The Azure internet of things team at Microsoft also recently released 11 new industry app templates to showcase the types of solutions that the firm’s customers and partners can build, including water quality monitoring, water consumption monitoring and connected waste management.

Read the article here: https://www.technologyrecord.com/Article/microsoft-announces-new-azure-features-at-smart-city-expo-2019-88413

Smart cities are going to have to put the people living there first if they’re hoping to innovate.

Smart cities are the future, but as modern infrastructure advances, it’s finding itself at a crossroads with the actual people that live there.

Modern cities are facing a wealth of problems, from climate change to housing costs to traffic to unemployment. Historically these issues have been tackled using politics and community incentives, but now, they’re being tackled with new smart city tech. Things like ride-sharing or home-sharing, connected public transport, et cetera.

All this integrated tech needs to be embraced by the people of the city though, which means that building the next generation of smart cities is going to take a massive amount of cooperation.

The Future of Smart Cities

As technology gets more capable to solve cities’ problems, there will be rising potential for conflict between this technology and the people it’s trying desperately to help. Issues like privacy and shared spaces and communal tech will arise. Believe it or not, people tend to not always agree on things, especially how technology should fit into their lives.

Civic leaders vying to create the next smart city and utilize technology to overcome the growing challenges of cities will need to minimize the damage of tech and maximize the benefits. This means transparency in tech, public engagement in the implementation process, and data privacy.

Transparency in Technology

The general public tends to be resistant to large corporations developing plans behind closed doors on how to implement technology in their city. Populations of cities tend to think of the public infrastructure as an extension of their home. So, when a technology company comes in and tries to “revolutionize” the city without explaining themselves well enough, the public can turn.

This represents a growing awareness of the general public to invasive technology. As society has become aware of just how dangerous technology can be, we’ve become more resistant to new technology that we’re not fully sure about. Gone are the days where people would wish the future into the present on a whim.

Data Privacy

Data, data, data. People more than ever recognize that having access and control over your own data is vital to maintaining security over your own information. People are generally fearful of a surveillance state, so as cities begin to roll out new technology, the general public will be resistant to “big brother” watching through the tech.

Smart cities will have to work to establish an aura of safety and security between the technology and the people living there if they want true mutual adoption.

There’s also a decent amount of ethics that will come into play in the implementation of smart cities and managing their data. We’ve already seen the banning of facial recognition software to ease residents’ concerns as it presents a slippery slope of bad actors.

Public Engagement in the Technology

The private sector is here to grow their own economy and create jobs, but the public sector is here for guidance and accountability. As the public and private sectors merge to create futuristic smart cities, keeping the accountability of the public sector at the forefront will be paramount to a projects’ success.

One key element that can ease friction between these two sectors is to have a mission-oriented project. Smart city projects that are focused on solving a core issue in a way that meets the needs of the city generally allow for greater public engagement and thus the adoption is eased.

Across these three core principles to implementing smart city tech is the idea of bettering human life through technology. So what cities are already on the right path?

Cities That are Getting it Right

Copenhagen

Copenhagen won the World Smart Cities award in 2014 for a project that used wireless data from phones merged with GPS signals to meet green initiatives city-wide. The project collected data about how people across the city moved with the goal of optimizing the flow of traffic throughout the city. In the end, it promised a 10 percent reduction of travel time for residents and a huge economic benefit as a result of these new efficiencies.

Singapore

Leaders in Singapore have created an initiative that involves a number of apps that give citizens a greater connection to the public services around them . Through the aggregagtion of data and community involved hackathons, the city has been able to improve efficiency in how the city runs all the while soliciting even greater community engagement.

Dubai

Dubai’s smart city initiative is goaled at measuring and improving the happiness of the citizens directly through integrated technology. The Government uses a “Happiness Meter” that is updated in realtime by citizens’ feedback during interactions with the city. This ultimately gives the decision-makers of the city an up to date model of how they’re doing and what they might need to improve upon. This is one way that new smart city tech can directly improve the lives of the people who live there.

Read the article here: https://interestingengineering.com/smart-cities-will-need-to-put-people-first-not-technology-in-order-to-survive

San Diego cellular provider is counting on growth from Internet of Things, including connected smart cities infrastructure

Like many municipalities, the city of Carlsbad has deployed connected water meters to reduce costs of sending crews out to read meters manually.

But these smart meters provide something perhaps more valuable than operational savings. They generate digital data on water use.

The Carlsbad Municipal Water District began running analytics software on that data to spot spikes and anomalies in consumption. For a time, a staffer would call residents to let them know their usage had surged.

The result was 16 million gallons of water saved in just six months, said David Graham, Carlsbad’s chief innovation officer, at Qualcomm’s Smart Cities Accelerate 2019 conference this week.

“That doesn’t exactly drive revenue for the city. We get more revenue the more water people use,” said Graham. “But it drives a better customer experience, and ultimately in California we want to reduce water usage across the board.”

The benefits and challenges of smart cities technologies were the focus of Qualcomm’s Smart Cities event, where more than 550 people, including representatives from 400 companies that make smart cities technologies, attended at the company’s Sorrento Mesa campus.

For Qualcomm, smart cities technology is part of its strategy to bring the wireless connectivity not only to smartphones but also to many other things including roads, energy and water grids and smart streetlights.

Faster, more flexible 5G networks, which have begun rolling out globally, have been tailored to eventually connect as many as one million devices per square kilometer — paving the way for a vast expansion of connected sensors, cameras and infrastructure.

For cities, connecting and analyzing data from connected street lights, water meters, energy grids and environmental sensors has the potential to improve safety, ease traffic jams and preserve scarce resources.

“At an intersection, which is really one of the most dangerous parts of driving, you can actually manage it with a combination of cars communicating with cars, cars communicating with the infrastructure and the infrastructure, with video, having the ability to understand exactly what is going on,” said Jim Thompson, chief technology officer of Qualcomm.

Along with water and energy meters, smart streetlights are among the early pieces of infrastructure to get smart cities connectivity — largely because wirelessly controlled LED lamps cut energy costs.

But they aren’t without controversy. Because they’re connected and vertical, smart streetlights form a digital canopy that can support an array of sensors, as well as cameras.

This week, a coalition of local community groups raised privacy concerns over the city of San Diego’s retrofit of 4,200 smart streetlights to include cameras, microphones and other sensors.

The cameras have been used in 164 law enforcement investigations since August 2018. San Diego police are working with city departments and other stakeholders to develop policies about how the data should be used.

Smart cities technologies face additional hurdlers — strained municipal budgets, the lack of standardized technologies that work together, data silos within government departments and long sales cycles.

Still, rapid urbanization is expected to drive demand for smart cities technologies and data analytics that help manage traffic and preserve natural resources, especially with the increasing focus on environmental sustainability.

The city of San Diego recently began analyzing origin and destination data from scooter companies operating downtown — coupling the information with existing bicycle, pedestrian and vehicle data from cameras and other sources.

The goal is to improve transportation planning in the city’s core.

“The old way of doing it was the Field of Dreams approach — you build infrastructure and hope people use it in the way you expect,” said Erik Caldwell, San Diego’s deputy chief operating officer. “Now we are starting to go back and let the data drive decisions on where should we put in dedicated bike lanes? Where should we take roads out? Where should we change speeds of travel?”

In Carlsbad, letting residents know that their water use had increased not only resulted in preservation, it also helped those residents save a combined $200,000 on their water bills, said Graham.

“People now see that this meter technology, which was just supposed to help us reduce the cost of running the system, is a benefit to residents,” he said. “It is changing behavior because we have this closer connection to customers.”

Read the article here: Qualcomm touts smart streetlights, water meters and other smart cities tech

Smart DCC, which runs UK’s smart meter infrastructure, sets out vision for harnessing technology to boost EV and smart grid uptake

Smart DCC, the company which runs the UK’s smart meter infrastructure, has today unveiled a five-year plan to better support the UK’s shift to smart grids and electric vehicles through smart meter technology, while also easing the process of switching between domestic energy suppliers.

Setting out Smart DCC’s purpose to “make Britain more connected so that everyone can lead smarter, greener lives”, the Business and Development Plan promises to deliver a host of improvements for smart meter users, energy suppliers and distribution network operators.

These include proposals to boost innovation in energy networks by enabling data to be gathered safely from smart meters. This will help support the shift to EVs, smart grids and other low carbon technologies, it said.

And, to aid smart meter research and development, Smart DCC plans to soon open its new test lab facility in Manchester, which will feature areas to work with customers on future innovation.

Smart DCC also plans to improve connections for smart meters in blocks of flats or homes with thicker walls, and the enrolment of first-generation meters onto Smart DCC’s centralised network in order to tackle the issue of meters losing functionality when consumers switch energy supplier.

The firm – otherwise known as the Data Communications Company – said its aim was to deliver faster and more reliable switching services to help energy consumers switch seamlessly switch supplier within one working day.

But Smart DCC, which is owned by outsourcing giant Capita, stressed that the rollout of smart meters was still its “immediate priority”, and stressed that installations were now occurring at a rate of 20 every minute, every day.

It comes as the UK faces a race against time to hit its own target of offering every home and business a smart meter by the end of 2020, in a project estimated to cost over £11bn in total.

“Delivering the smart meter roll-out remains our commitment and the number one priority for the passionate, hard-working team in the DCC and its contractors and service providers,” insisted Smart DCC’s chairman Richard McCarthy. “Together we are digitising Britain’s analogue energy network and making a critical contribution to decarbonisation in the UK.”

Advocates of smart meters argue they are key to helping consumers and business better manage their energy use, which can save money on bills as well as boost energy productivity in order to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The technology also opens up potential business opportunities from using energy data to digitally connect green technologies such as battery storage and EVs.

However, to date only between 12 and 13 million smart meters have been installed in the UK. That leaves just under 40 million to be fitted before the end of next year, which the National Audit Office has said will prove an almost impossible target.

Earlier this year the government unveiled new proposals to promote the technology to small businesses and other non-domestic sites in a bid to get the smart meter rollout back on track.

But Smart DCC CEO Angus Flett claimed the company had “made some impressive progress” over the past year, having delivered 1.6 million second-generation smart meters.

“This five-year plan sets out how working with our customers we will bring cost savings and innovation to this platform for good,” he added. “This work reaffirms the DCC’s purpose of making Britain more connected so we can all live smarter, greener lives.”

Read the article here: ‘Smarter, greener lives’: Five-year plan aims to boost smart meter innovation

Local governments must protect your privacy as they turn to “smart city” technology.

Walking through the streets of New York City, you can feel the thrill of being lost in the crowd. As throngs of people filter past, each going about their days, it seems possible to blend in without being noticed.

But as municipalities and companies pursue the dream of “smart cities,” creating hyper-connected urban spaces designed for efficiency and convenience, this experience is receding farther and farther from reality.

Consider the LinkNYC kiosks installed across New York City — more than 1,700 are already in place, and there are plans for thousands more. These kiosks provide public Wi-Fi, free domestic phone calls and USB charging ports.

Yet the LinkNYC kiosks are not just a useful public service. They are owned and operated by CityBridge (a consortium of companies that includes investment and leadership from Sidewalk Labs — a subsidiary of Alphabet, the parent company of Google) and are outfitted with sensors and cameras that track the movements of everyone in their vicinity. Once you connect, the network will record your location every time you come within 150 feet of a kiosk.

And although CityBridge calls this information “anonymized” because it doesn’t include your name or email address — the system instead records a unique identifier for each device that connects — when millions of these data points are collected and analyzed, such data can be used to track people’s movements and infer intimate details of their lives.

In other words, this free Wi-Fi network is funded the same way as Google itself: using data to sell ads. As Dan Doctoroff, a deputy mayor in the Bloomberg administration and now the founder and C.E.O. of Sidewalk Labs, told a conference in 2016, the company expects to “make a lot of money from this.”

LinkNYC exemplifies the trend in “smart cities” today: the deployment of technologies that expand the collection of personal data by government and corporations. Certainly, this data can be used for beneficial outcomes: reducing traffic, improving infrastructure and saving energy. But the data also includes detailed information about the activities of everyone in the city — data that could be used in numerous detrimental ways.

Whether we recognize it or not, technologies that cities deploy today will play a significant role in defining the social contract of the future. And as it stands, these smart city technologies have become covert tools for increasing surveillance, corporate profits and, at worst, social control. This undemocratic architecture increases government and corporate power over the public.

First, smart city technologies make it easier than ever for local and federal law enforcement to identify and track individuals. The police can create and gain access to widespread surveillance by acquiring their own technology, partnering with companies and requesting access to data and video footage held by companies. In Los Angeles, for example, automatic license plate readers recorded the location of more than 230 million vehicles in 2016 and 2017, information that, through data-sharing agreements, could have found its way into the hands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Similarly, the police in suburban Portland, Ore., hoping to aid crime investigations, have used Amazon’s facial-recognition software to identify more than 1,000 people who have appeared in camera footage.

Second, the smart city is a dream come true for companies eager to increase the scale and scope of data they collect about the public. Companies that place cameras and sensors on Wi-Fi kiosks, trash cans and streetlights will gain what had been unattainable insights about the behavior of individuals. And given the vast reach of hard-to-trace data brokers

that gather and share data without the public’s knowledge or consent, one company’s data can easily end up in another’s hands. All of this data can be used to exclude people from credit, jobs, housing and health care in ways that circumvent anti-discrimination laws.

Once these smart city technologies are installed, it will be almost impossible for anyone to avoid being tracked. Sensors will monitor the behavior of anyone with a Bluetooth- or Wi-Fi-connected device. Given the expansive reach of cameras and the growing use of facial-recognition software, it is increasingly impossible to escape surveillance even by abandoning one’s personal digital technology.

This reality suggests that if you want to avoid being tracked in a smart city, you must stay out of that city.

Read the article here: Smile, Your City Is Watching You

With the deployment of a fifth-generation network in China that comes with high speed and low latency, industrial applications including education and entertainment will discover new market opportunities.

At the Mobile World Congress Shanghai, China Mobile signed a partnership agreement with firms like NetDragon and TAL on smart education applications to be run on 5G networks.

Interactive education will soon become a reality with high-speed and low-latency 5G-enabled data transfer, especially in the developing and rural regions which struggle for quality education. It will make educational resources more accessible and interactive, said Xiong Li, CEO of NetDragon.

Fuzhou-based NetDragon has developed a virtual reality lab for physical and chemical experiments and digital board for schools. With 5G development and cooperation with China Mobile, the new services will be available online and in more schools nationwide.

Kazakhstan’s Ali Almira, founder of AR in Education, is showcasing its AR applications that are used in education, health care and marketing. She attended the MWC Shanghai to look for potential partners to promote AR application that is specifically designed in Chinese for kids and students.

China Mobile’s subsidiary Migu also signed an agreement with Mango Media to establish a joint 5G lab. Besides Mango, it has invited overseas partners like BBC, NBA and Discovery to seek opportunities on HD contents in the 5G era.

Migu broadcasts 350 sports and entertainment events now. It will increase the number of broadcasting programs after the 5G deployment. The company also works with Sichuan’s panda base to produce documentaries and ringtones and music with panda themes.

China Unicom has established a 5G research center with iQiyi on edge computing, super high definition, VR and AR applications. Both sides will try to build a new ecosystem for VR, said iQiyi, China’s leading online video website with 100 million paid users already.

BOE, China’s biggest LCD panel vendor, showcased its latest technologies in Shanghai such as ultra-high-definition screens and foldable display.

4K or 8K high-definition screens will become more popular in China with a jump in contents. 5G, with high-speed data transmission, will help content providers and journalists to obtain and produce more HD contents, including live broadcasting with 5G networks, analysts said.

Consumers want to deal with more contents as the picture, webpage, social network, game and video on smartphones will require bigger screen spaces. It’s a potential opportunity for BOE, which is offering foldable screens with Huawei’s Mate X phones.

Read the article here: 5G to play a significant role in entertainment and education

When the city of Columbus, Ohio, submitted its bid to become Amazon’s HQ2, city officials rolled out the usual fanfare: an assortment of tax incentives, promotion of its major educational institutions and real estate deals. But the hallmark of its proposal was a pitch to create a smart city by “embracing the reinvention of transportation to accelerate human progress.” The proposal noted that Columbus had just won the first-ever U.S. Department of Transportation Smart City Challenge, beating out 77 other communities with its proposal to become a model for connected cities of the future.

Columbus is not alone. Around the world, as increasingly mobile workforces prize connectivity, seamless transportation and sustainability as the determining criteria for quality-of-life, cities – large and small – have recognized that technology has become the great equalizer. From Boston to Bangkok, cities are unveiling plans to link fiber optics, light rail lines, automated vehicles and 5G networks in a seamless grid of always-on mobility.

An estimated two-thirds of cities globally are investing in smart city technology, with spending projected to reach $135 billion by 2021. Currently, the top applications being pursued include; smart utility meters, intelligent traffic signals, e-government applications, wi-fi kiosks and radio frequency identification sensors in pavement.

However, not everyone is on board with this movement. Privacy advocates recently launched a campaign to stop Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs smart city project in Toronto, citing a lack of transparency and concerns about how the company is collecting and using citizens’ personal data. As more smart city initiatives continue to gain momentum, they will raise significant questions about the role of private enterprise in government, the reliance on untested new technologies and the very definition of infrastructure spending. Sidewalk Labs released its master plan for the project this past Monday in an effort to address some of those concerns and promise to create “the most innovative district in the world.”

One example that shows both the real-world progress and the complex maze of regulatory and infrastructure-related issues that go along with these types of initiatives is the U.K.’s recently-announced effort to revolutionize the way people find parking spots with mobile apps that identify open spaces and allow you to pay for parking from your phone. Before the project can get off the ground, however, government and local authorities need to agree on a single standard for parking data. Only then will app developers be able to access the information on available parking spaces, permitted times and pricing that they need to begin the process of creating digital parking apps.

While the initiative seems completely logical, it introduces a debate on data privacy and level of collaboration between governments and private sector companies that can make some people skittish. As parking consultant Steve Vollar told the BBC, “There will be a lobby who will object to online payment details and knowledge of their movements.”

Read the article here: Are Smart Cities The Next Great Disruptor?