Tuesday 31 January 2012

The Watchful Eye

Cities as platforms for living - the ubiquitous streams of real-time data, overwhelming our analytic capabilities, has the information we need to sustainably manage our living environments. Innovation and granular deployments may be the key to the future.



  Surveillance Video Becomes a Tool for Studying Customer Behavior
MIT Technology Review

Software mines security footage to help business owners see what people do once they're inside the store.
The huge success of online shopping and advertising—led by giants like Amazon and Google—is in no small part thanks to software that logs when you visit Web pages and what you click on. Startup Prism Skylabs offers brick-and-mortar businesses the equivalent—counting, logging, and tracking people in a store, coffee shop, or gym with software that works with video from security cameras.
"There's a lot of wonderful information locked up in video, and 40 million security cameras in the U.S. collecting it, but it's data that's not been available," says Steve Russell, cofounder and CEO of Prism, based in San Francisco. "We want to free up that information."
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Monday 30 January 2012

Helsinki Urban Flows

Urbanflow, a joint effort of Nordkapp and Urbanscale, envisions an operating system for cities. The scenario explored in the video revolves around situated urban screens and their potential uses.
The general challenge is that while cities are fast, municipal decision making is slow by nature. The heavy and invisible decision-making process within cities causes disconnect with citizens, and despite an abundance of commercial messaging platforms, there is yet to be a dedicated platform where the city and its citizens can meet.