Digital City Briefs - London

Building on the Success of Olympics: TV Everywhere from Any Device

2012-10-09T19:52:00.003-04:00

TV used to be bulky and immobile. Now, it has become mobile and can be accessed from any device with an Internet connection. “Synacor successfully provided authentication for NBC Universal’s TV Everywhere 2012 Summer Olympics on behalf of nearly 40 pay-TV customers, spanning all 50 states, reaching 25 million subscribers.”

Whether Synacor is successful in freeing up TV will depend on its ability to scale up to authenticate millions of customers, provide a bridge for hundreds of identity systems, allow social log-in from platforms such as Facebook and Google +, allow login from multiple platforms and devices and monitor suspicious account activity across multiple devices seamlessly.

Reference: Synacor Enhances Cloud Identity Management Platform, PR, Synacor, September 6, 2012

Other Recent Posts:

Social Media Winners at the Olympics

Life after the Olympics

The Olympics Aquatics Center by Zaha Hadid

Beijing's National Aquatics Center

Social Media Winners at the Olympics

2012-08-17T19:49:00.001-04:00

London 2012 Olympics was the first social-media Olympics. The social media activity showed how popular some champions, performers or events were. For example, the Jamaican gold-medals winner Usain Bolt received 80,000 tweets per minute for his 200m sprint final, while Spice Girls received more than 116,000 tweets per minute during the closing ceremony.

Social media activities display the brand potential of various athletes. But does brand potential translate into revenues? The organizers think so. They created an Olympics Hub that managed all social media activities. “At the center of the strategy was the Olympic hub, a curated site where all social media interactions of the athletes were collated and was searchable by games, by sport, by team or by individual.”

Reference: Rooney, Ben, Social Media Proves Gold for Promoting Athletes, The Wall Street Journal, August 16, 2012

Other Recent Posts:

Life after the Olympics

The Olympics Aquatics Center by Zaha Hadid

Beijing's National Aquatics Center

The National Center for the Performing Arts, Beijing

Life after the Olympics

2012-07-21T12:54:00.001-04:00

From the beginning, the organizers of the London Olympic Games have focused on the long view, and have used the games as a way to transform an area of London that is in need of development. The master plan is designed to “bolster connections both within the neighborhood and between the Lower Lea Valley and the rest of London, lacing the site with new east–west streets and adding pedestrian walkways from the Olympic park to the Stratford station.”

The master plan for the Olympic Village includes underground power lines, creation of 50,000 jobs and addition of 35,000 housing units to the area. A large part of the site will become the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park after the Olympics, which will make it the largest urban park built in Europe in 150 years.

Reference: Hawthorne, Christopher, Seventeen Days Later, Architect Magazine, June 2012

Resources:

Online Job Bank

Online Directory of Products and Services

Upcoming Events

Noteworthy Educational Programs

Noteworthy Publications

Olympic Size Nightmares

2012-07-21T12:38:00.003-04:00

London will be hosting the Summer Olympic Games in a few days. That is where the good news ends. Londoners are unhappy about many things: the persistent rainy season that refuses to go away, subway traffic (“absolute shambles”), road closings (“complete nightmare”), unsold tickets, the cost of the Olympics, poor community outreach, poor security arrangements and so on.

“Asked “What do you feel about the Olympics?” the other day, a random sampling of people here gave answers that included bitter laughter; the words “fiasco,” “disaster” and “police state”; and detailed explanations of how they usually get to work, how that is no longer possible and how very unhappy that makes them.”

Reference: Lyall, Sarah, The Olympic Spirit, British Style: When Will This Nightmare End?, The New York Times, July 19, 2012

Resources:

Online Job Bank

Online Directory of Products and Services

Upcoming Events

Noteworthy Educational Programs

Noteworthy Publications

The Lightest Olympic Stadium in History

2012-06-27T19:27:00.001-04:00

London is trying to revive the run down East London area by hosting Olympic games there. The main Olympic Stadium will morph into a smaller community stadium after the games are over. The seating capacity will reduce from 80,000 to 25,000. This shrinkable stadium will be cost effective, energy efficient and use only 11,000 tons of steel as against 42,000 tons of steel used by the 2008 Bird’s Nest Stadium in Beijing.

“That the core concept of creating a large-scale arena that could easily become smaller led to money-saving construction and operational solutions illustrates how one inventive, focused design goal can often lead to others. While the Olympic Stadium designed by Populous won’t be a permanent landmark in its full form, the creative ideas behind it will likely resonate and live on.”

Reference: Jana, Reena, London’s Olympic Stadium: larger than life but built to shrink, smartplanet.com, June 19, 2012

Other Recent Posts:

The Olympics Aquatics Center by Zaha Hadid

Beijing's National Aquatics Center

The National Center for the Performing Arts, Beijing

London Festival of Architecture

2012-06-27T19:18:00.000-04:00

The London festival of architecture is a citywide event to bring architects and communities together to examine how to make London a better place. This year’s theme is “The Playful City”, which is appropriate because of the collective focus on upcoming Olympic Games.

The festival runs from June 23rd to July 8th.

Reference: London Festival of Architecture, thintank.org, June 3, 2012

Other Recent Posts:

London Property Market Skyrockets with Turmoil in Greece

The Container Cities

The Olympics Aquatics Center by Zaha Hadid

London Property Market Skyrockets with Turmoil in Greece

2012-06-01T20:34:00.000-04:00

Threatened by the turmoil in Greece, old Greek money is moving to London to invest in upscale properties. Almost nine billion euros have left Greece since the election alone. It appears that the best London homes are attracting a growing interest from buyers from countries such as Greece and Spain, as a way to protect their assets. The value of prime London real estate has gone up 44% in the past three years, which is more than twice the increase in London as a whole. According to the web site of property agent Savills, number of Greeks looking for homes worth 1.5 million pounds or more, has jumped 39 % in April 2012 compared to the average rate of prior six months.

Please click here for a video on "Wealthy Greeks Spur Demand for London's Luxury Homes"

Reference: Bill, Tom, Euro zone turmoil boosts London property stampede, Reuters, May 13, 2012

Reduced Funding for Highways and Major Streets

What's Happening With Boston's Redevelopment?

Ambitious Plans for the 125th Corridor in Harlem

The Container Cities

2012-05-24T20:03:00.003-04:00

As the post on Johannesburg reveals, creative uses for shipping containers have been spreading across the globe. London’s Container City, on the Thames at Trinity Buoy Wharf, is one of the most famous container cities. It is a five story structure with units stacked on top of one another. The project is environmentally friendly and is built to human scale.

The container components can be adopted for use as classrooms, office space, retail spaces and even community centers. The modular configuration, ease of construction and cost savings from recycling surplus industrial products, make them attractive to builders of affordable developments.

Here is a video on "Eco living in Shipping containers - Dreamspaces"

Reference: Benfield, Kaid, Shipping container "cities" bring creative, funky approach to green construction, sustainablecitiescollective.com/kaidbenfield , May 11, 2012.

Living in a Shipping Container

Cholula’s Container City

Prefab Homes Tour on June 17th

The Olympics Aquatics Center by Zaha Hadid

2012-05-19T13:47:00.004-04:00

The Olympics Aquatics Center by Zaha Hadid

Beijing's National Aquatics Center

Competition Winner for the 2018 World Cup Stadium

The Underwater Hotel

Mash-Up Plans for the Battersea Power Station

2012-05-18T21:29:00.000-04:00

The proposed Chelsea Football Stadium at the Battersea Power Station has a potential to transform this part of London. A conceptual design by an internationally renowned team of architects calls for turning the Battersea Power Station into a fun place for sporting and entertainment events, without compromising the integrity of its original architecture. Can the elected officials match this bold vision with strong leadership and infrastructure investments by bringing together various community groups and private entities?

Reference: Murray, Christine, A Chelsea stadium in Battersea Power Station is the best idea yet. Don’t listen to Lister, The Architect’s Journal, May 10, 2012

Photo Credit: Geekchic under the GNU Free Documentation License.

My Zeil Shopping Center

Cloudy Outlook for Commercial Real Estate

Washington DC’s Planned Unit Development Process

London

2012-05-03T20:26:00.000-04:00

Here is a video on London:

Moscow City Tour

Tour of Rio de Janeiro

Tour of San Francisco

London Hotel Accommodations

2012-05-01T20:00:00.000-04:00

Approximately 320,000 visitors will visit London in July for the 2012 Olympics. They will compete for 140,000 hotel rooms according an estimate by the UK Government. According to Hotels.com, a typical London hotel room during the Olympic Games will cost 210 pounds a night, which is more than double the average room rate of 103 pounds last year.

Some Londoners see an opportunity to make money by offering furnished rooms in their homes. Others are going one step further by offering their backyards for temporary accommodations, complete with free English breakfast, according a story by Chris Spillane on Bloomberg.com.

Here is a brief look at the Olympics site:

Anti-Aging Spa Treatment in a Timeless Hotel

Hotel Boom in the Outer Boroughs

Waiting For The Streetcar

Smater Cities

2012-04-29T07:22:00.000-04:00

Here is a video that discusses smarter cities:

Boston to Share Data with Six Cities

Learning From Collaborative Networks

Dealing with "firetrap" apartments

London's Growth

2012-04-28T13:10:00.001-04:00

Here is a video on London's early growth:

Rapid Urbanization

China's Urbanization

Mumabi: The Megacity

Urban Development Taxonomy

2012-04-26T20:28:00.002-04:00

How does a city develop into a global destination? Is a city more than a collection of great buildings? Is a city more than a collection of great people? What makes a city great? What are the forces that drive urban development?

There are many sites that provide tourism related information about cities. While we want to understand what makes a city great, we are also interested in the messy gray area, where decisions are made about the future of a city. What drives such decision-making? Is that purely a speculative gamble or are there hidden forces at work? What roles do design professionals play in such decision-making? What role does leadership play? Where does such leadership come from? What role does local government play?

We will focus on four broad categories of urban interventions:

Tourism development:

Urban interventions intended to spur or support tourism.

Hotels, convention centers, museums, art galleries, public arts festivals, fashion shows, business shows, public expositions, public events. Ecotourism, sustainable tourism, heritage tourism, leisure, recreation, urban tourism, parks, sports stadiums, arenas, public plazas,

Smart infrastructure:

Urban interventions intended to spur or support smart urbanization technologies.

Smart grid, smart design, smart transit, smart buildings, renewable energy, sustainable architecture, green building, smart architecture, smart meters, smart traffic signaling, mass transit, smart city, smart infrastructure, augmented reality, urban data networks, collaborative networks, digital city.

Economic development:

Urban interventions intended to spur or support economic development.

Business incubators, start-ups, universities, research centers, innovation labs, demonstration projects, affordable housing, transit hubs, rezoning, urban renewal, environmental remediation, brown fields, urban design, new construction, renovation, mass transit systems, manufacturing, warehousing, freight delivery, transportation, logistics, urban upgrading, finance, law, regulations, institutions, leadership.

Branding and global identity:

Urban interventions intended to create a unique brand.

Global influence, city image, uniqueness, branding, identity, signature buildings, global events, public expositions, leadership, historic preservation, tourist attractions, urban design, celebrations.

Miscellaneous Key words:

General information, summary, statistics, comparative study, geography, emergency preparedness, disaster mitigation, low income housing, urbanization, slum upgrading, geography, climate, culture, people, demographics, history.

Photo Credit: Dickbauch under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.