A Need-Based Smart City Development

Recently, Ceresus has published the 2018 Smart City Development Index Report, which uses a need-based smart city development framework to evaluate twelve smart cities globally. The result shows that Amsterdam and Boston were ranked at the top among the twelve cities. Meanwhile, Songdo, Korea, is expected to lead in the smart city development among Asian smart cities upon the completion of its construction.

The “smartness” of a city, we believe, is defined by its ability to mobilize and enhance the collaboration between government agencies, business entities as well as citizen groups to achieve better collective lifestyle management and development goals such as financial and political functions to a state. However, we have observed that the development of smart cities across the globe is still mostly steered by ICT centric mentality rather than the real needs of citizens. This causes difficulties in collaboration among different key players and low adoption rate of “smart” solutions consequently.

How Big Data Is Leading Better Healthcare

Aging means that the support pyramid of pension, 401K or similar mechanism will stop working sooner or later. Lots of healthcare expenditures would be shifted from managing the last few years of our lives to managing lifestyle at an early stage of our adulthood. Some treatments would stop being developed but lifestyle management will be an even hotter spot than today. Data would replace all-organic frenzy and become next “in” topic for all of us.

Wearables have started its flight to excite the society with the sense of empowerment on our own health, lifestyle and “data.” The declining adoption of wearables also suggests the question, “what is next that I can control better with my own lifestyle?” MedTech giants and software innovators hence are scrambled to answer with a seemingly sophisticated equation. The way to take the profit out of consumers’ pocket are yet to be identified.