“The focus in the industry to date has been on larger vertiports located at existing airports. This is the low-hanging fruit which will form the essential backbone of an Advanced Air Mobility ecosystem,” said Clem Newton-Brown, Skyportz CEO. “However, if this industry is to reach its potential we need to break the nexus between aviation and airports and let private property owners develop their own vertiports.”

On its end, Skyportz is focusing on affordable options that property developers can incorporate into new developments or retrofit into existing buildings.

“We will soon be releasing a beautiful tiny modular vertiport building that can be delivered to site in a shipping container, and assembled without heavy equipment, complete with a high-powered battery bank and charger with solar panels,” Newton-Brown added.

The Skyportz system will provide something of value from the moment of installation — the battery pack and solar panels can be hooked in to power the host building and the vertiport building can be used for other purposes while we wait for aircraft to get certified.

It is generally considered that it is too soon to get approvals for vertiport uses from Governments as the standards are still in development and nowhere in the world has anyone set out the rules and regulations (other than for display sites).

“Skyportz will be getting our network of vertiports and battery packs established now with enthusiastic property owners who will come back later for an aviation use permit. In the meantime, they will have developed sustainable power storage and a vertiport building that could be used as a cafe or meeting room”, said Newton-Brown.

Skyportz will be announcing further partners once their modular design is released later this year — including weather data, air traffic management systems, booking services, and aviation operators.

“We will offer a complete solution for property owners to activate their sites for aviation. And as a modular, fully transportable system we will be able to supply any global market with our partners at Electro.Aero”, said Newton-Brown.

On its end, Electro.Aero will be supplying its battery charging and power storage tech to support electric aviation. Their systems will be suitable for all electric air taxis, with the added bonus of providing sustainable power to the host building.

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Called the Community Internet Program, it provides free access to city-owned rooftops to internet service providers (ISPs) who commit to offering reduced- or no-cost internet service to qualifying households in the district. The idea is that the service can be beneficial for households and act as hubs within DC neighborhoods.

Following the announcement, WeLink started developing the neighborhood hubs in Wards 5, 7 and 8, beginning with the Trinidad neighborhood. Households need to be eligible for Biden’s Affordable Connectivity Program to qualify.

“We were focused even before the pandemic on bridging the digital divide, but now we know that that work is even more urgent,” DC’s mayor Muriel Bowser said at the time of the Community Internet Program announcement. “The world has moved online in even bigger ways. In fact, the pandemic fast-tracked that for learning, for jobs-seeking, for health.”

WeLink’s CTO Lindsey Parker said that affordability from providers would be a priority, adding that all partnering providers will be required to participate in the federal Affordable Connectivity Program. These companies will also be required to provide connections that reach at least 200 megabits-per-second (Mbps) when downloading and uploading.

Together, Parker said, the partners will look to provide the service to every address in DC, beginning with the neighborhoods that need it most.

“We knew that solving for the digital divide in DC was not going to be easy,” Parker said. “And the past two years [2020 and 2021] only served to amplify the urgency with which we needed to act, and we also knew that we couldn’t solve it once.”

As of May 2022, the city had $15 million in federal funds to plan for internet deployment around DC. It will also obtain $100 million over the next five years via the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.

Parker also co-chairs the Technology Innovation Subcommittee, within the Build Back Better Infrastructure Task Force that Bowser previously created, which oversees how those funds are spent and plans for broadband across the city.

The funds and initiatives offer DC the chance to be more equitable within its tech ecosystem and build inclusion into the city’s tech scene while it grows, Parker added.

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In other words, the tool — which is basically a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) for forest management — enables land managers to plan, prioritize, and execute fire prevention and forest health projects in months rather than years — including thinning hazardous timber, clearing fuels from roadsides, and conducting prescribed burns.

“We are facing concurrent, intertwined climate, wildfire, biodiversity, water, and health crises that cross jurisdictions and affect each and every one of us. Our future depends on how quickly we adapt, cooperate, and take action. With Land Tender, we can harness the best science, technology, and data to protect and restore forests and mitigate risk, quickly and at scale,” said Vibrant Planet CEO and Land Tender’s founder Allison Wolff, an early leader at Netflix and advisor to eBay, Google, Facebook, Drawdown, Conservation International, and other organizations on vision, strategy, culture change, and user-experience design over the past two decades.

Land Tender kicked off with a partnership with the Tahoe Fund, a nonprofit, and the California Tahoe Conservancy — helping land managers and owners, fire districts, scientists, local NGOs, and other stakeholders update Lake Tahoe’s community wildfire protection and forest health plan for the entirety of the lake’s 500-square-mile watershed basin. Simultaneously, a second partnership with the Truckee River Watershed Council created a comprehensive fire management plan for Lake Tahoe’s outlet, the Middle Truckee River Watershed, which serves as the main water source for the City of Reno and the Paiute Tribe in Northern Nevada.

“The Caldor Fire made it into the Lake Tahoe Basin, and we narrowly averted catastrophe, in part because of proactive fire prevention and forest health projects,” Tahoe Fund CEO Amy Berry said at the time of the Land Tender announcement. “Land Tender is a unique tool that can help communities like ours dramatically speed up the timeline of critical forest management projects — some of which have previously taken up to 10 years to plan and execute. This is exactly the type of project we started our ‘Smartest Forest Fund’ to help accomplish.”

In the last few years, we were witnessing intense, destructive, and costly wildfires driven by unnaturally dense forests, expanded development in fire-prone areas, and climate change — which has dried out vegetation, extended the fire season, and led to pest outbreaks that have killed millions of trees across the western U.S. In 2020 in California alone, wildfires resulted in the following:

• $3-4 trillion in ecosystem benefit losses at today’s market valuation, including carbon emissions and loss of carbon sequestration, water quality, recreation, and wood products;
• $63 billion in public health impacts;
• $2.3 billion in fire suppression costs; and
• 20 years of lost profitability for the insurance industry due to structural damage and loss.

Even as these cross-jurisdictional fire threats and costs escalate, land management planning and practices have remained largely the same — siloed, paper-based, and slow — with projects often taking up to 10 years to plan and execute. As governments and land managers scramble to adapt, Land Tender is a solid option to help catalyze a swift shift to proactive, technology-driven land management, backed by the best data and science, to reduce wildfire risks, restore watersheds, and protect habitat and biodiversity.

With Land Tender, parties across jurisdictions can collaborate and rapidly assess the current resilience of, and risk to, landscapes and communities, create and compare treatment scenarios at any scale, and make informed, ready-to-implement decisions in near real-time. This planning is done by utilizing high-resolution, three-dimensional datasets — including satellite imagery and aerial Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) technology — coupled with best-in-class infrastructure data to identify key inputs such as homes and utility infrastructure. Remote sensing, machine learning, and artificial intelligence also enable land managers to continuously monitor project progress, shift priorities and resources based on evolving conditions and threats, and gain insights on effective land management techniques to build community and wildland resilience.

Land Tender was designed with significant input from land managers, emergency responders, scientists, NGOs, and local and regional policy and decision-makers and built by a team of seasoned technology, ecology, and forest management leaders. It was first piloted in 2019 in collaboration with the North Yuba Forest Partnership to help bolster the resilience of a 275,000-acre, fire-prone watershed that serves as a key tributary to the Sacramento River Delta. The project, financed by Blue Forest’s Forest Resilience Bond, helped multiple landowners and collaborators assess current conditions and risks, define forest health and community protection objectives, and develop science- and data-informed treatment plans that the Yuba Water Agency and other funders could support.

Land Tender will generate a continuous pipeline of forest health and wildfire mitigation projects across the western U.S., supporting the development of a workforce of thousands to safeguard communities and restore western landscapes.

Vibrant Planet was started with $8 million in initial venture capital and philanthropic support from investors such as Earthshot Ventures, Facebook’s chief product officer Chris Cox, Netflix’s former chief product officer Neil Hunt, Elemental Excelerator, The Jeremy and Hannelore Grantham Environmental Trust, Halogen Ventures, and several private family foundations.

In June 2022, the company raised a $17 million seed round, adding more investors to the mix — including Ecosystem Integrity Fund (round lead), Valia Ventures, Cisco Foundation, and Day One Ventures, among others.

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In July 2022, the company announced UbiHub AP6, a triband Wi-Fi 6 Access Point that enables communities to enable public Wi-Fi. The platform integrates PoE, making it easy to support third-party equipment such as cameras and license plate readers. Also, at that time, they unveiled the UbiHub AP/AI, which adds dual 4K cameras, directional microphones, and a neural AI processor to the mix. The last mentioned is meant for street analytics and 15 days of video storage.

Both UbiHub solutions are compatible with more than 360 million streetlights worldwide and can be installed in seconds plugging into the existing streetlight photocell socket.

The idea to integrate multiple functions into one easy-to-install platform is sound, and according to Northeast Group – this approach reduces the total cost of ownership by 42% when compared to conventional multi-vendor solutions.

“Our UbiHub is the ‘Swiss Army Knife’ of intelligent infrastructure for cities and utilities,” Ian Aaron, CEO of Ubicquia, said in a press release. “Whether you need to scale the deployment of cameras and license plate readers across multiple vendors or simply expand broadband in commercial areas and parks, UniHub is the only multi-function product in the market that installs in seconds and delivers data in minutes.”

UniHub platforms enable cities and law enforcement to cost-effectively scale and transform their existing streetlight infrastructure into a network of connected digital assets. Specifically, the solutions can help:

• Enable faster, evidence-based crime detection, investigation, and deterrence;
• Reduce traffic congestion, improve pedestrian safety and increase bicycle lane utilization;
• Expand city broadband deployments in commercial areas and parks.

Like other Ubicquia products, UniHub is managed and monitored with UbiVu, Ubicquia’s cloud visualization and analytics management system. In addition, UbiVu supports APIs that integrate with leading third-party video management systems, evidence clearance platforms, and police real-time crime centers.

The City of West Hollywood in California is among municipalities that have deployed UniHub, and are now collecting all kinds of data for their future planning development needs. Another client is the County of Hawai’i, which is using the solution to enable equitable internet access and close the digital divide throughout Hawai’i Island, and so has the City of Ontario, which deployed 12,500 UbiCells for smart lighting analytics and energy savings.

With more than 360 million street lights globally, these vertical assets are increasingly viewed by cities as critical enablers for new smart city applications, according to Ben Gardner, President of market intelligence firm Northeast Group. “Starting with well proven energy and cost savings derived from intelligent lighting controls, new solutions are now evolving to boost public safety, broadband access and the automation of municipal functions,” he added.

Aside from UniHub, Ubicquia also has other products in its portfolio, including UbiCell, which enables smart streetlight control; UbiMetro, a streetlight small cell that accelerates 4G and 5G network deployments; and UbiSmart AQM+, a sensor that monitors a city’s air quality index, noise levels, and environmental data.

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The pilot project involves a smartphone app using which citizens can control the city’s street lighting, like brightening the lights in a dark storm or dimming them when the days get longer. This isn’t only cool in a gimmicky way but could also reduce the city’s energy consumption.

The story comes from Bad Hersfeld, the 30,000-population spa town in Germany that has teamed up with [ui!] Urban Lighting Innovations — which constructs and modernizes street lighting systems for smart cities. Other project supporters include Microsoft, Deutsche Bank, and the Berlin Institute of Technology.

The system uses artificial intelligence (AI) and works even without interference from residents, relying on sensors to collect data on traffic, ambient light and weather conditions to adapt the lighting accordingly. For example, lights are dimmed on empty streets, causing less light pollution.

These are all energy-efficient LED lights that have a much longer lifespan than normal streetlights and, with this adaptive use of dimming and brightening, can actually save a city like Bad Hersfeld up to 90% of its energy consumption while significantly reducing its carbon footprint.

This is fairly important because cities are major sources of CO2 emissions, consuming 78% of the world’s energy and producing more than 60% of greenhouse gas emissions. Street lighting accounts for the largest energy costs in a public budget of many cities — in European cities, up to 50%.

“Cities need individual, decentralized solutions for street lighting if they want to move to a more sustainable model,” explained Lutz Heuser, [ui!] CEO. “Light in public spaces should be energy-efficient, safe for traffic, and it should meet climate protection goals but also the needs of citizens. It can be a challenging proposition, but it’s one we set out to meet with Smart-City-as-a-Service.”

The project has been awarded the Smart 50 Award by the US-based Smart City organization, and Bad Hersfeld is the only German city — and one out of only two European cities — to receive the award this year. Heuser believes that if every city in Germany followed Bad Hersfeld’s lead, the country could achieve the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2050 net-zero target. “It has been proven and it works,” he said.

In phase two of the project, the citizens of Bad Hersfeld are taking control of their street lighting. Using a mobile app, they can dim lights that, for example, reflect off wet streets, causing a safety hazard, or shine directly into bedrooms.

Finally, to make this sort of smart lighting available to more cities throughout Europe and elsewhere, [ui!] created the light-as-a-service model. This means that a city can pay for lighting annually for the term of the contract without paying a hefty fee upfront.

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To tackle this problem, researchers from the University of Technology Sydney have developed new “intelligent compaction” technology, which can be integrated into a road roller to assess in real-time the quality of road base compaction. As a result, it can reduce potholes and maintenance costs, leading to safer and more resilient roads.

Said technology uses an innovative machine-learning technique to process data from a sensor attached to a construction roller. The study was led by Associate Professor Behzad Fatahi, head of geotechnical and transport engineering, together with Professor Hadi Kahbbaz, Dr Di Wu, and Ph.D. student Zhengheng Xu.

“We have developed an advanced computer model that incorporates machine learning and big data from construction sites to predict the stiffness of compacted soil with a high degree of accuracy in a fraction of a second, so roller operators can make adjustments,” said Associate Professor Fatahi.

Generally speaking, roads are made up of three or more layers, which are rolled and compacted. The subgrade layer is usually soil, followed by natural materials like crushed rock and then asphalt or concrete on top. The variable nature of soil and moisture conditions can result in under or over-compacted material.

The adopted machine learning method incorporating Gaussian Kernel and Generalised Gegenbauer Kernel functions can reasonably predict the double-layered soil modulus during roller compaction. Researchers conducted additional analyses to observe the proper training size and number of iterations to achieve real-time quality control to be used by site engineers.

“Like Goldilocks, the compaction needs to be ‘just right’ to provide the correct structural integrity and strength. Over-compaction can break down the material and change its composition, and under-compaction can lead to uneven settlement,” added Associate Professor Fatahi. “A well-compacted multi-layer road base provides a stable foundation and increases the capacity of a road to bear heavy loads. Trucks can weigh up to 40 tonnes, so a poor quality base can quickly lead to cracks and weak spots in the asphalt surface.”

Researchers have published their paper in the peer-reviewed journal Engineering Structures, suggesting the application of this technology could help build longer-lasting roads that can better withstand severe weather conditions.

Now, the team is looking to test the technology onsite for various ground and roller conditions for road, railway and dam construction projects. Also, they want to explore techniques to measure the density and moisture content of the compacted soil in real time during construction.

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There is a need for new systems, new products, and new ways of thinking for this underserved community to get a fair shot at wealth and prosperity. And that’s what the fintech company called Mobility Capital Finance, Inc. (MoCaFi) is all about – to provide the financial infrastructure for cities to create an equitable government.

That infrastructure includes a multifunctional city card that provides users with access to emergency disbursements, banking for the unbanked, transport, libraries, local discounts and more.

Some of the places where a MoCaFi-enabled program has been implemented include:

• Los Angeles: Sidewalk Vendors received rebate payments from the city of LA through MoCaFi Immediate Response Incentive cards.
• Brooklyn: Bed-Stuy Restoration Corp distributed over $200,000 in COVID relief to eligible families via MoCaFi Immediate Response Incentive Cards.
• Honolulu: Honolulu Immediate Response Incentive Cards issued to 4,000 residents with $500 loaded for purchase at grocery & convenience stores across O’ahu island.
• Newark: Offers MoCaFi Immediate Response Incentive Cards to participants of the city’s Universal Basic Income (UBI) program.
• Miami: Back to Work Program issued $250 Immediate Response Incentive Mastercards to eligible residents for financial assistance during COVID-19 pandemic .
• Atlanta: Greater Atlanta Builds Credit delivers Rental Payment assistance and financial coaching to Atlanta families.
• New Orleans: The Crescent City Card Program involves a series of initiatives and products to offer financial inclusion, access to emergency disbursements, incentives to drive economic growth, empower underbanked residents, and provide better access to City services.

In addition to providing credit/debit cards, the company’s offering also includes the MoCaFi Bill Pay that lets users add Billers and issue checks to pay them from the app without logging into separate websites or writing physical checks. This is important as rental payments made by check to the landlord are eligible to be reported to Equifax and TransUnion as a way to boost one’s credit score with a positive payment history. Rent funds are immediately debited from the user’s account and the check is mailed in 1 business day. New payment history is added to the credit profile in 30-45 days.

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There is a growing potential for using wind power, particularly in city streets. At the same time, however, the harmful anthropogenic influences on our planet are increasing ever more — especially in densely populated areas. A problem that has often been neglected in this context is light pollution. Every year the worldwide amount of artificial light is growing by 6 percent.

Light pollution not only has bad health effects on humans — like causing sleep disorders, depression, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes and cancer — but has also a serious impact on flora and fauna. For example, it is estimated that currently in Germany alone around 1.2 billion insects die in one single summer night because of street lighting.

A new kind of street lamp aims to tackle this challenge, It’s called PAPILIO and it is reducing the ecological footprint of street lighting many times over by generating electricity with an integrated wind generator while at the same time minimizing light pollution.

A brainchild of German design student Tobias Trübenbacher from the University of the Arts Berlin, PAPILIO features an integrated Savonius rotor for which the wind direction is irrelevant. Due to its diagonal orientation, the rotor works with vertical (natural wind) as well as horizontal air streams (e.g. airflow caused by traffic). A rechargeable battery stores the generated electricity and can thus also bridge periods of calm. This makes it possible to operate PAPILIO completely autonomously without a necessity for expensive underground electricity infrastructure. Alternatively, the product can also be connected to an existing power grid in order to feed surplus energy into the network during strong winds.

In order to minimize light pollution, the product is designed as a “full-cut-off” light, only emitting light downwards. In addition, the street lamp provides an infrared sensor, which only activates the light when it is actually needed. Due to a lower blue component and a warm color temperature of 2800 Kelvin the used light spectrum is less attractive to insects.

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As of April 2021, there are 26 new S-Poles in 6 areas of Seoul — including Seoul Plaza, Sungnyemun Gate, Cheonggyecheon Stream and more. Each S-Pole has customized functions reflecting the characteristics of the area. They also enhance urban scenery and improve the safety, welfare, and convenience of citizens.

The SMG aims to expand areas of S-Pole installations and pursue a pilot project to advance their functions at the end of 2021. Specifically, they want to add new capabilities to these S-Poles and use them for charging drones and electric vehicles and detecting parking violations — bringing Seoul one step closer to becoming a smart city.

The idea is to install stations on top to charge drones, while also using S-Poles to send data used for monitoring disasters and rescue operations. A function of monitoring illegal idling and parking will be added as well.

The S-Poles were born to replace several traditional city technologies such as the aforementioned traffic lights or streetlights, which could have many more features. The installation of S-Poles will lead to the amelioration of urban scenery through the integration of diverse facilities, saving the replacement cost by using the street facilities that have reached changing times, and securing the safety of the facilities.

The project also reflects a growing trend for street infrastructure to be multipurpose to minimize visual clutter and use of public space.

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And so in March 2021, engineers from Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University (NTU) Yoo Seongwoo and Charu Goel unveiled a smart device to harvest daylight and relay it to underground spaces, reducing the need to draw on traditional energy sources for lighting.

Said smart device consists of an off-the-shelf acrylic ball, a single plastic optical fiber — a type of cable that carries a beam of light from one end to another — and computer chip-assisted motors. The prototype designed by the team weighs 10 kg and has a total height of 50 cm.

When the acrylic ball is facing toward the sun, it acts as the solar concentrator that focuses the incoming rays of sunlight onto the optical fiber. The focused sunlight is then collected into one end of a fiber cable and transported along with it to the end that is deployed underground. Light is then emitted via the end of the fiber cable directly to a dark space in order to give it light.

The ball itself is stationary and surrounded by a transparent polycarbonate dome to protect it from the elements. The engineers inserted a GPS and clock-enabled chip into the ball to adapt the location of the optical fiber throughout the day. This helps the team ensure that the fiber is always at the back of the ball and is not blocking any sunlight. The platform is tiny, so it is driven by just a couple of low-power electric drives.

The device is lightweight and compact, making it extremely suitable to be incorporated into existing infrastructure in the urban environment, such as on top of a conventional lamp post.

The NTU team tested the smart device in a pitch-black storeroom to simulate an underground environment. They found the device to be more efficient than LED bulbs, and is being more than two times brighter than commercially available LEDs.

It is hoped that a commercial version of the technology could incorporate a pole-mounted ball, along with an LED bulb beside the light-emitting end of the fiber, which would automatically switch on at sunset.

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