IfG.CC -
Institute for eGovernment

The agreement is the foundation for establishing a smart city based on information and communication technology with a goal to provide outstanding level of services in the region, said a statement from Kingdom Holding Company (KHC).

As per the deal, STC will ready a smart fiber-optic network to provide the Kingdom project with an integrated information technology solution for all communications and services.

Saudi Arabia’s smart city NEOM has hosted its first UK roadshow event in London to promote investment opportunities.

It was attended by over 250 leaders from the country’s business, financial, environmental and political circles.

Launched by Saudi’s ambassador to the UK, the Discover NEOM event included presentations, panels and an exhibition of NEOM in film and images, paving the way to direct meetings with the project’s CEO and industry leaders.

“We have new design plans for Makkah, Jeddah and Taif,” Makkah governor Prince Khaled Al-Faisal told a meeting on smart city applications earlier this week.

“It’s our opportunity to take the initiative now. All we need is good management and a strong will to start the project.”

Stockholm has claimed the Smart City 2019 award for its GrowSmarter project at the Smart City Expo World Congress in Barcelona.

The Swedish capital was commended for its ‘innovation, openness and connectivity’ and efforts to improve living conditions for residents.

GrowSmarter brings together the public and private sectors to integrate 12 smart city solutions across energy, infrastructure and mobility.

Smart sensors are part of what makes a city smart. But recent visits to Berlin and Barcelona suggest that ground-up, collaborative efforts by citizens and entrepreneurs are the essential ingredients to turn a smart city into a truly compelling place to call home.

At first glance, Berlin, Barcelona and Singapore do not seem to have a lot in common. A closer look, however, will show that all three aspire to become "smart cities" in order to increase the quality of urban life.

Service going on trial in CBD by end-June is among slew of Smart Nation initiatives

Finding open-air public parking will soon get easier with an upcoming digital service that will let drivers check the availability of spaces before reaching a car parking lot.

The service is one of several initiatives Minister-in-charge of the Smart Nation Initiative Vivian Balakrishnan announced yesterday in Parliament, giving an update on Singapore's Smart Nation drive.

As Singapore and China work together on creating smart, sustainable cities, Deputy Prime Minister Heng Swee Keat has called on Singapore companies to seize the opportunities that come with it.

These could be in areas such as urban planning and design, as well as on the technology front.

Mr Heng made the comments to the media on Wednesday (Oct 16) during his first visit to Tianjin Eco-City – the second government-to-government project between Singapore and China.

No longer a novelty like a few years ago, smart technologies are now crucial to helping a city attract talent, create jobs and improve the quality of life for citizens.

In Singapore, one of the world’s foremost smart cities today, the progress has not been deemed fast enough. It is considering a number of initiatives to move things along more quickly.

With near-daily headlines about some of them hitting and injuring pedestrians, others racing on roads at high speed and the rides even causing fires, you’d expect personal mobility device (PMD) riders to be trying a little more to stay out of trouble.

Yet, it was no surprise that, on a jog just now, I easily found more reminders of the menace. A youngster sped down a road in a PMD at car speeds, another on a pavement honked at everyone to give way and yet another failed to slow down round a corner, nearly colliding into me.

Over the past decade, smart cities have moved from being a buzzword to a reality. From cashless societies to autonomous vehicles and intelligent surveillance systems, the world's reliance on data and connectivity has risen dramatically.

While a city's smart infrastructure improves the quality of life for citizens, it also brings the unwelcome consequence of increasing its security vulnerabilities. Cyber criminals continue to exploit a city's interconnectedness to carry out malicious activities, and cyber threats are further magnified as data becomes integral to a city's operations and interdependent social and economic systems.

In a first in the Asia-Pacific region, SMU has inked a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Tata Consultancy Services for “integrating cloud technology with the relevant business know-how to create urban management IT solutions,” said Steven Miller, Dean, School of Information Systems (SIS), SMU.

Singapore scored gold in IDC Asia/Pacific’s 2016 Smart City Asia Pacific Awards (Scapa). The island-state came up as the biggest winner in South-East Asia with three awards.

The winning Singaporean projects were the Smart Yuhua Residential Estate under the Smart Buildings category; the Initiative to Develop Singapore as a Global Hydrohub in the Smart Water category; and The Next Generation National Trade Platform under the Economic Development Category.

The idea of a smart city is no longer just an image we see in futuristic movies.

Although technology may not have mastered flying vehicles just yet, a number of locations around the world are utilising the growth of technology and innovation by applying it to their surrounding landscapes. The term smart city is not only being thrown around more frequently but has also become an important feature that city builders consider, from additions in new apartments to more efficient transport links.

Bahrain is moving towards the creation of 'smart cities' that will revolutionise the way people live their lives, according to a senior official.

EGovernment Authority chief executive Mohammed Ali Al Qaed revealed thought was going into how technology can be used in transport, utilities, healthcare, retail and homes to improve life experience, said a report in the Gulf Daily News (GDN), our sister publication.

All over the world, governments, institutions and businesses are combining technologies for gathering data, enhancing communications and sharing information, with urban infrastructure, to create smart cities. One of the main goals of these efforts is to make city living more efficient and productive – in other words, to speed things up.

Yet for citizens, this growing addiction to speed can be confounding. Unlike businesses or services, citizens don't always need to be fast to be productive. Several research initiatives show that cities have to be "liveable" to foster well-being and productivity. So, quality of life in smart cities should not be associated with speed and efficiency alone.

How Smart Cities Are Shaping the Future of Commercial Transportation

The rise of smart cities is changing how we live, work, and travel. These cities use data, technology, and intelligent infrastructure to solve problems and improve daily life. One area where this change is significant is in commercial transportation. The systems that move goods across cities are evolving fast, from delivery trucks to freight trains. In this article, we’ll explore how smart cities transform commercial transportation to make it faster, cleaner, and more efficient.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s dream of changing the urban landscape into smart cities is taking shape as the government approaches a year in office.

The Union Cabinet recently cleared the Smart Cities Mission - under which 100 smart cities would be built - and the Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation (AMRUT) for 500 cities with outlays of Rs 48,000 crore and Rs 50,000 crore, respectively.

“If the essence of urban development is individual action, then a city can only be as smart as its citizens.” - Michael Batty, Bartlett Professor of Planning at University College London

Despite their recent surge in popularity, smart cities are not a new idea. In fact, their origins can be traced back a hundred years to the work of early 20th century urban planner Le Corbusier, who understood the home as a "machine for living in."

Our cities are getting smarter. Look around any modern metropolis, and you’ll see hundreds of Smart devices. Devices that provide better convenience, increase our safety, enable connectivity anywhere, reduce our traffic jams, improve our economy – all with a view to improving the quality of life for all.

But with this tech revolution comes a need to change how our cities are powered – to get rid of all that cable and wiring that brings with it costly and disruptive construction. These smart devices are digital, and require very little electricity – that old security camera that needed 200W, now runs on your phone, and needs perhaps 1-10% of the power that it used to.

The term “smart city” elicits a wild vision of the world of tomorrow: flying cars, floating homes, transportation tunnels, and pretty much anything else you remember from The Jetsons or Futurama. However, the reality of smart cities is hardly the sci-fi innovation it sounds like. But that doesn’t mean we don’t need them more than ever.

Between increasing populations, inefficient transportation, and dangerous weather conditions, the cities of today face a wide range of serious problems, many of which can be addressed through technology. However, solving these problems takes more than an IT task force and a paltry budget. You need common sense advancements that actively improve the lives of citizens on a daily basis.