The Urban Technologist | People. Place. Technology.

It has been a busy few years since I last wrote this blog regularly, during which time the Smart City has grown up – to an extent.
For much of the last decade, the Smart City sector was dominated by grant-funded technology trials. There were exceptions, of course, particularly in the form of grass roots initiatives, which I’ll come to later....

Isaac Asmiov’s 1957 novel “The Naked Sun“, set on the planet Solaria whose inhabits interact with each other solely through “trimensional images”, and avoid personal contact
(This post was originally written for the August 2020 issue of the UK 5G Newsletter)...

The “Festival of Love” on London’s Southbank in 2014. Sometimes unattractive technologies – in this case concrete – can create great places.
As an IT Architect in the 1990s, I used Design Patterns as a tool to exchange knowledge with industry colleagues as we tried to solve what were then complex challenges – the execution of failure-proof transactions across distributed applications on the...

(Amazon acquired the warehouse robotics startup Kiva in 2012 for $775 million as part of its strategy to automate its extensive retail and distribution organisation. The strategy has sparked a debate concerning the extent to which automation in the retail...