IoT

Smart Cities: Technology Trends (Part 1)

Smart Cities: technology trends (Part 1) Follow @rodgerlea Recently I’ve been asked to write a technology trends paper for the IEEE looking at the main technology trends affecting Smart Cities. This is a broad topic, covering a lot of ground and I’ve been forced to pick a subset of technology trends that are affecting the evolution of smart cities. I’ve broken the topic into manageable sections – each a single blog post – as follows: PART 1 (this blog) Smart cities:…

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Electric Vehicles and the Smart City – energy impact and usage

Take-up of Electric Vehicle   Electric vehicles are coming – worldwide growth rates are picking up with China leading the world. However the implications for smart cities, in terms of increased electricity demand, smart grid infrastructure and CO2 abatement are not as simple as you’d think.       As shown below (From EV columes.com), global monthly sales are now at 70,000 vehicles. Not a lot compared to global sales of regular cars, but it’s now significant and growing rapidly.  …

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Smart City Standards – an overview

Trying to make sense of Smart City standardization activities Follow @rodgerlea Updated Jan 2017. You may be interested in my article on Technology Trends affecting Smart Cities which includes a discussion of Smart City Standards. Update Nov. 2016: This blog has been turned into an article for the IEEE standards online Magazine, read it here Recently I’ve been trying to get a handle on Smart City standards for an IEEE trend paper I’ve been asked to write on Smart Cities.…

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Node-RED tutorial

  Update May 16: We’ve added a new lecture covering Dashboards/UI techniques to the lecture series on Node-RED – check it out at: http://noderedguide.com/. They complement the tutorials described below and offer a step by step guide to learning how to program using Node-RED. Roberto Calderon over at Sense Tecnic (www.sensetecnic.com) has been busy over the summer creating some excellent tutorials for Node-RED as well as for the WoTKit which is the IoT platform sitting underneath the Urban Opus data hub.…

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Smart City Datahubs – an innovation ecosystem enabler

Follow @rodgerlea One of the most significant issues facing Smart Cities is how to use OpenData and City Data, especially citizen contributed data, to facilitate new innovative city services. Pushing Opendata to city websites has certainly opened up data for access, but it’s still the case that most Open Data is hard to use – partly because of data formats and partly because of the lack of consistent access. These issues become even worse when you want to add in data…

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Smart Cities: technology challenges

 As part of our recent hackathon, a series of questions were asked to the local organizers of the cities involved in the Global Urban Datafest. The questions and answers give some useful insight into the main issues we are trying to address and my thoughts on how we at Urban Opus can tackle those issues. —- As a faculty member at the University of British Columbia and President and CEO of Internet of Things platform company Sense Tecnic, you spend…

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