Sidewalk Labs

[Sushubh]

Dan Doctoroff, the former CEO of Bloomberg LP and Deputy Mayor of Economic Development and Rebuilding for the City of New York, and Google today announced the formation of Sidewalk Labs, an urban innovation company that will develop technology at the intersection of the physical and digital worlds, with a focus on improving city life for residents, businesses and governments.

Dan will be the CEO of Sidewalk Labs, which will be based in New York City. The company will combine Dan’s experience in building and managing cities, with Google’s funding and support.

The announcement of Sidewalk Labs comes as the world is continuing a massive urban shift. At the same time, new technologies - including ubiquitous connectivity and sharing, the internet of things, dynamic resource management and flexible buildings and infrastructure - are emerging to allow cities and citizens to tackle problems in real time.

New technologies are already transforming commerce, media and access to information. However, while there are apps to tell people about traffic conditions, or the prices of available apartments, the biggest challenges that cities face -- such as making transportation more efficient and lowering the cost of living, reducing energy usage and helping government operate more efficiently have, so far, been more difficult to address.

Sidewalk Labs will develop new products, platforms and partnerships to make progress in these areas.

Sidewalk Labs

 

[Sushubh]

Sidewalk Labs Launches Coord, a City-Planning Platform | WIRED

IN OCTOBER OF last year, Alphabet, Google's parent company announced it was taking its data-hoovering powers out of purely digital realm and into 3-D space. Sidewalk Labs, its urban innovation venture, officially launched a partnership with the city of Toronto, where it would experiment in improving—nay, optimizing—city streets by observing and measuring how people live.

“This is not some random activity from our perspective,” Alphabet Chairman Eric Schmidt said at the time. “This is the culmination, from our side, of almost 10 years of thinking about how technology can improve people’s lives.”

OK, Google: This is IRL.

Now, that work is moving beyond Toronto, to any city that wants to create a frictionless, efficient transportation network. (Who wouldn't?) Today, Sidewalk Labs is launching its own mini-venture, which builds on its work with cities. "Coord" will do what you’ve been hearing a lot of transportation-adjacent companies say they’ll do lately. It will build the cloud-based platform to integrate the many mobility services that have sprung up around the world's cities in the past few years—bike-sharing, car-sharing, and ride-hailing—plus more traditional transportation options, like public transit.

 

[Sushubh]

'Surveillance capitalism': critic urges Toronto to abandon smart city project | Cities | The Guardian