This morning I was at 55 St. Clair Avenue West for IBI Group’s annual general meeting. And at this meeting their CEO, Scott Stewart, officially launched a new accelerator called the Smart City Sandbox.
Here is a description of what that is taken from a press release that was also published this morning:
The Sandbox is a smart city-themed accelerator, focused on bringing innovative new products and systems to urban environments that improve the quality of life for residents. A technology hub that supports small-and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), as well as entrepreneurs and start-ups, the Smart City Sandbox will operate out of a designated space at IBI Group’s Toronto headquarters, be open to global applications, and officially open doors with its first smart city-themed cohort in September 2018.
And here is a photo from this morning:
Slate Asset Management is proud to be a founding partner of the Smart City Sandbox and we’re thrilled that it will live at Yonge + St. Clair in midtown Toronto.
Our role is to provide our domain expertise as asset managers and developers, and to offer participants in the program access to real-world building systems and data from our holdings in the area.
For more info, go here.
And if you were at (or listening to) the meeting this morning, I’m sure you noticed something that we talk a lot about on this blog. To thrive today, virtually every company now has to think and act like a technology company. IBI Group is doing precisely that.
Uber is currently testing a feature in a few neighborhoods in Boston and San Francisco called Uber Express POOL.
Like the regular version of Uber POOL, this is a shared ride. But with Express POOL the app now automatically generates “smart spots” that are easy to drive to and close to the origin and destination of multiple passengers.
So instead of a direct pick-up and drop-off, you now need to walk a few blocks to one of these dynamically created “smart spots.” In exchange for the added inconvenience, you get 25% off your fare.
What’s immediately fascinating about this feature is that it further blurs the line between Uber and public transit. These “smart spots” are effectively low-volume and ephemeral transit stops that pop-up based on demand and then disappear.
It makes the notion of a fixed stop and transit schedule, particularly in low usage areas, seem inefficient. Now imagine if we created some sort of visual marker on the street every time a “smart spot” was emerging based on demand.
It is clear that Uber is trying to price these rides so that they are competitive with conventional public transit. And there’s no reason that this technology couldn’t also be applied to larger vehicles, such as buses.
I find this fascinating. And it’s a perfect example of what we talked about in yesterday’s post. This is software and networks being layered on top of the built environment.
There’s a lot of buzz around the idea of a “smart city.” IBM is involved. Cisco is involved. And so are many others. But what exactly is a smart city?
In the Electric City talk below, Adam Greenfield provides his definition, while at the same time being critical of the ones we currently use today, such as this one: It’s the missing link – the connective tissue – between the real estate and technology sectors. (Personally, I find this definition really interesting.)
He also goes on to argue that the way we’re largely thinking about smart cities today is incorrect. We’re far too centralized and administrative in our thinking. Instead, we should be focused on leveraging the crowds of people in our cities that are now virtually all networked.
He then goes on to list 5 technological preconditions to any smart city:
Broadband connectivity
Low-cost smartphones or personal devices
Commitment to open municipal data
Cheap public interfaces
Cloud computing infrastructure
If you’re interested in this topic, I suggest you watch his talk. It’s only about 10 minutes long. Click here if you can’t see it below.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9keDwTBmZ3o?rel=0]
Update: This post was revised to reflect the fact that Adam Greenfield is “sharply critical” of the real estate + technology definition of a smart city.