WHY IT MATTERS: Digital Transformation

WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT

Cities will contribute an enormous amount of data to help improve travel, work and life in general.

Alphabet new company called sidewalk has proposed a wifi kiosk that can be installed anywhere to provide a variety of services including: wifi, advertising, noise sensor, harmful package detection, amongst other. This is part of a smart city push.

WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT

Google focus now is more and more about bridging the real world with digital technologies. This new device and new company shows how important the field of smart cities is - very seldom does Google invest its energy into areas that do not have the potential to become billion dollar revenue generating endeavours in the short term. 

The most interesting aspect of this new product is that it blends together many different solutions into a single product. The kiosks serves as a wifi access point - which has often been considered alone - and blends with sounds, video and other sensors then merges advertisement to pay for itself. Brilliant! We need more devices like that, especially in stores where we often see single purpose devices being deployed as price check points or ipad based information kiosks. They could be so much more....