Tag: innovation

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Digital Playground in Wales

The Welsh Government has some really switched on people who understand IoT technology and are excited at the potential benefits of LPWAN for businesses and people in the many rural areas of Wales. They have been raising awareness across the country and Thingitude has delivered workshops and spoken at meetings to help de-mystify technology like LoRaWAN and get businesses excited about how it could benefit them.

One of our bigger projects this year has been in North Wales. Funded by Menter Mon and working with Gwynedd Council and Glynllifon Agricultural College, we have been helping to turn the Glynllifon estate into a “Digital Playground” where local businesses (and individuals) can see a range of sensors connected to an engaging and interactive web application via The Things Network. They can also experiment with, build and install their own sensors and add them into the web application.

Continue reading “Digital Playground in Wales”

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Things Connected for Local Authorities

One of the big projects of the last year has been running an innovation programme for Digital Catapult and four Local Authorities – Croydon, Suffolk, Sutton and Thurrock. The innovation programme was part of the Catapult’s excellent ThingsConnected programme – which aims to stimulate more UK interest in LPWAN, because we are woefully behind some of our European neighbours.

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The innovative UK businesses involved in the programme

Each of the councils put forward a specific challenge, and the idea was to invite UK businesses to work with the councils to understand the challenges in more depth, and then propose solutions to the challenges using LPWAN technology – LoRaWAN, Nwave, Sigfox, etc. The winning ideas would then be implemented in the borough for a live trial. Continue reading “Things Connected for Local Authorities”

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Things Connected innovation programme

Since last summer I’ve been helping Digital Catapult with their Things Connected programme – an intervention to encourage UK business to learn about LPWAN technology and how it can work for their organisation.

In the last quarter of 2017 I organised and ran an innovation programme for small businesses working on LPWAN solutions for social housing and independent living use cases. These are two areas that councils believe have potential to benefit from the Internet of Things, and LPWAN in particular. Continue reading “Things Connected innovation programme”

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Will Smart Cities lead us to Subtopia?

Why you must influence the Smart City agenda where you live

In 1955 critic Ian Nairn wrote a piece for Architecture Review called “Outrage”, in which he coined the term “Subtopia”:

Subtopia is the annihilation of the site, the steamrollering of all individuality of place to one uniform and mediocre pattern

Nairn was calling for the preservation of characteristic places, fearful that if things were allowed to continue then “…the end of Southampton will look like the beginning of Carlisle; the parts in between will look like the end of Carlisle or the beginning of Southampton.”

Over 60 years later the New Economics Foundation (NEF) has found that 41% of our town high streets are clones, full of national identikit chain stores and devoid of local character, with another 23% well on their way. Continue reading “Will Smart Cities lead us to Subtopia?”