There are a lot of tech startups in the Flatiron District
So lets hear it for NYC taking its place at the table of technology innovation. However, we’d love to see how that sort of activity is really influencing the economy. Also, we’d like to know how the economy is valuing that type of innovation.
Take for example, the recent acquisition of Instagram (a company of 12 employees) by Facebook for 1 BILLION DOLLARS (reference: Dr. Evil). We’re happy that these people have allowed us to tweet a sepia toned picture of the last hamburger we had at shakeshack. Maybe some of that creative and tech-minded energy could be better put to use trying to solve the great problems of the day?
We don’t need any more apps that cross-post and multi-tweet the latest coffee shop you walked into. Really, we don’t.
Also, since we’re all about innovation here at Urbanitis, we are also going to take this opportunity to coin a new term: SoMe. Its just so hard to type Social Media all the time. Do you think we can get a cool Billion for coining the term SoMe? I mean isn’t SoMe what social Media is all about?
It took place in 2011 but is an inspiring initiative.
Summer of Smart is a new model for how citizens and government can work directly together to address urban issues. Developers, designers, city officials, urbanists, journalists, community members, and more are building rapid innovation prototypes and presenting them directly to government. It’s our vision for Democracy 3.0.S
Networked cities in the digital age
Jennifer Pahlka is the founder and executive director of Code for America, which matches web professionals with US cities to reboot local services. Code for America funds fellowships that bring technologists into municipal offices to sort databases, build apps and unleash data. Philadelphia is one of two cities to be part of the program two years running (http://codeforamerica.org/philadelphia).
There is a vast amount of information about a city which is invisible to the human eye – crime levels, transportation patterns, cell phone use and air quality to name just a few. If a city was able to be defined by these characteristics, what form would it take? How could it be mapped?
Nadia Amoroso tackles these questions by taking statistical urban data and exploring how they could be transformed into innovative new maps. The “unseen” elements of the city are examined in groundbreaking images throughout the book, which are complemented by interviews with Winy Maas and James Corner, comments by Richard Saul Wurman, and sections by the SENSEable City Lab group and Mark Aubin, co-founder of Google Earth.
A futuristic drawing from the 1870s printed in the humor magazine Punch that shows a mother and father in England carrying out the equivalent of a video conference with members of their family in Sri Lanka.
—- E-topia: The Future of Cities in the Digital Age An essay on a public lecture presented by William J. Mitchell at the Amman City Hall, Amman on February 26, 2000
