Greetings from Seattle.
PitchBook is a tech company headquartered in a tech city, and as proud as we Seattleites are of the innovation happening around us, the coronavirus outbreak has been humbling.
The appeal of living in a “smart city,” where technology and infrastructure are intertwined, has taken on a brand-new meaning—the smartest things we can do right now are wash our hands and work from home.
Weiterlesen: US: Washington: Seattle: Tech in the Time of Coronavirus
The city of Las Vegas and NTT Corporation (NTT) announced the Accelerate Smart project has expanded to include two new locations – the city’s Community Healing Garden and a portion of Las Vegas Boulevard at South Main Street and East St. Louis Avenue.
As part of the partnership, NTT and the city plan to further expand the smart cities project to Bob Baskin Park, Rotary Park, Stupak Park and Ethel Pearson Park this summer before adding six additional parks by the end of 2020.
Weiterlesen: US: Nevada: The city of Las Vegas and NTT to further expand the smart cities project
Plus, IBM’s Call for Code content has now named three winners with projects related to the crisis, a new economic tracker is visualizing the impact of the ongoing crisis in real time, and more.
Utah has launched a new chatbot to help residents find COVID-19 information on the state’s website, Utah.gov.
The bot was launched by the Utah Department of Technology Services, and it’s called Porter. Porter — which is really an automated text support tool — can also help visitors to Utah.gov with routine COVID-19 questions, thereby enabling human customer service agents to focus on more complex inquiries.
On May 7th, 2020, I listened to Greg Hermann, the Deputy City Manager for the City of San Luis Obispo speak to my Web Technologies for Planning course. He spoke about his personal career experience and the role of technology in public planning and governance, especially in civic technology and public engagement.
Civic technology connects users and residents to their community. One notable benefit to civic tech is the involvement of civic pride and the adoption of various local features in the city. One example Greg Hermann presented is the Adopt-a-Hydrant program of the City of Boston. Citizens can sign up to claim responsibility for a local fire hydrant and shovel out any snow to keep it accessible to emergency fire services. This program allows Boston residents to feel more connected and engaged in their community while providing a free service that saves the city time and money instead of sending public employees to clear the snow around the buried hydrants.
Dive Brief:
- Hopewell City Public Schools in Hopewell, VA has plans to retrofit 31 school buses with wireless routers to provide Wi-Fi access to roughly 1,000 students who don’t have reliable internet access at home during the novel coronavirus pandemic.
- The buses will be deployed within a few weeks to densely populated areas of the city, the school district's supervisor of information technology Kris Reed told Smart Cities Dive. The wireless signal from the parked buses can reach homes within about 300 feet, or the length of a football field, he said.
- The school district is partnering with technology company Kajeet to install the wireless routers. The initiative costs about $29,000, and nearly half of the cost has been funded by grants, according to Reed.
Weiterlesen: US: Nevada: Virginia city outfits school buses with Wi-Fi for remote students