David Vogt

David Vogt

Originally an astronomer, Dr. Vogt found himself in cyberspace. David is a pioneer - driven by the purposeful civilization of digital frontiers. He specializes in collaborative applied innovation, specifically bringing together entrepreneurs, researchers, customers and other stakeholders to co-create original, market-ready solutions involving emerging technologies. David's focus is the experience economy: how humanity is entering an era of almost magical ability to stage and mediate individual and collective experience.

Urban Opus joins the Urban Technology Allliance (UTA)

The Urban Opus Society has begun discussions to join the Urban Technology Alliance (UTA), a new organization having focused on helping cities, industry and academia accelerate Smart City ideas from poC to viable and sustainable service. Urban Opus will be present at the launch and has committed to provide leadership in the development of data brokerage solutions enabling the harmonization open, corporate and citizen data streams. UTA is a global non-profit organization providing city-scale testbeds from all around the world,…

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LoRaWAN – An IoT Urban Innovations Platform

One of the challenges with achieving smart city goals, especially involving citizen participation, is that it isn’t yet easy, or cheap, to get everyday urban things to talk to the Internet.  There’s a variety of staging technologies including Bluetooth, NFC, RFID, WiFi and cellular, but each has a significant range, reliability, or cost limitation. For example, if I’m a citizen and for whatever reason I want to talk to my bicycle over the Internet, or I run a small company and…

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Canada’s Vision for Smart Cities

Canada’s National Research Council (NRC) has identified Cities of the Future as a game-changing technology and economic opportunity.  Following a national dialogue, an Executive Summit was held in Toronto on March 31, 2016, resulting in an important summary report that will become the seed for Canadian R&D strategy in this sector. The conclusion so far is that the opportunity for Canada is to muster leadership in the following three areas (in order): Better Infrastructure and Infrastructure Management Efficient Transportation; and Renewable Energy The…

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From Smart Urban to Smart Rural

Urban Opus is a partner in a new Canadian national research project looking at how data can benefit rural communities. Not surprisingly, the vast majority of ‘smart city’ projects occur in large urban centers.  There are a variety of reasons for this, including the unfortunate perception that rural cities, towns and villages have less cash, capacity and incentive for data solutions.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  For example, while large cities seek economic benefit from the smart management of the internal complexity of…

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A Poster for Smart City Public Engagement

In preparation for some workshops Urban Opus has created a poster (below) to illustrate the how open, proprietary and citizen data co-exist in smart cities intent on effective public engagement. The key insight is that most cities currently have completely unbalanced priorities related to the Inform, Consult, Involve and Observe interaction channels with their citizens through data.  Healthy, smart cities will seek to cultivate an evolving, transparent balance. ESRI has separately classified citizen engagement into seven categories as follows: Public Information, Public Reporting,…

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Mobs, Tribes & Peers

A new start-up venture emerging from Urban Opus is demonstrating how social networking data can help communities become stronger, smarter and more innovative. The “wisdom of crowds” is like an urban myth: we want to believe, but tangible examples are hard to pin down.  And don’t crowds often turn into mobs?  Volatility and unpredictability make us wary of digital democracy. If collective humanity is to become a primary source of intelligence for smart cities we need to understand how to make ‘common sense’ not just absolutely reliable, but also quantifiably better than any other…

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BookLore – The Internet of Things We Read

My local public library has a door slot for returning books after hours.  You can see the growing pile of books through the window, and on some weekends the pile gets so tall, reaching back up to the slot, that you can imagine a fantasy scenario where the books inside have crawled to the door and climbed on top of one another to try to get out through the slot, perhaps to search for readers… A similar ‘social life of…

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Canada’s new priority on the Future of Cities

Canada’s National Research Council (NRC) has today announced that the Future of Cities is the first of a series of high-priority innovation drivers for the Canadian economy.   The Future of Cities priority was distilled from a program of national consultations resulting in the NRC Gamechanging Technologies Initiative.

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BC Hydro – Smart City Panel – October 27

Smart Cities on the Pathway to Net-Zero – 2015 Power Smart Forum – October 27, 2015 Vancouver BC Hydro hosts an annual Power Smart Forum for its major customers, and this year a keynote panel will address “Smart City” opportunities globally, and in Canada, with specific focus on smart grids and energy-related innovations. Smart cities are about open data, open infrastructure, and open innovation. Digital technologies and innovative design are changing the way citizens use resources and are affecting how…

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