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Smart city technology should do things like shorten commute times, speed the construction of affordable housing, improve the efficiency of public transit, and reduce carbon emissions by making building technology more efficient and providing less polluting transportation alternatives to the car. But often its proponents focus on what it can do rather than what it should. If Sidewalk’s Quayside failure taught us anything, it’s that these technologies need to respond better to human needs. — MIT Technology Review
The MIT Technology Review took a dive into the abandoned pre-pandemic conversion of Toronto’s 12-acre Quayside waterfront plot into an elaborate “Smart City” development by the hands of Sidewalk Labs. The revitalization was recently repackaged as a mixed-use green corridor concept to be... View full entry
Drones will soon be buzzing overhead in Dallas-Fort Worth, bearing small containers filled with Tylenol and Band-Aids. Wing, a subsidiary of Google parent company Alphabet, is bringing its drone delivery service to the Texas city, its first densely populated market. — The Verge
Walgreens will be the first U.S. retailer to employ this new service. For now, just one Walgreens in the Dallas-Fort Worth area will be involved, making deliveries to the city of Fresco and the town of Little Elm. The drones will arrive in small containers that serve as hangars from where the... View full entry
The technology giant is teaming up with its subsidiary, Sidewalk Labs LLC, and Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan to launch an infrastructure holding company that is being spun out of Sidewalk. Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners, as the new firm will be known, will focus on investing in what the group calls technology-enabled infrastructure, the partners said. — The Wall Street Journal
The firm, according to The Wall Street Journal, will target its investments on "advanced mobility, energy, water and waste, digital infrastructure, and social infrastructure" projects that require more than $100 million in equity. View full entry
In 2017, Sidewalk Labs, aka Google's Company for Cities, announced plans to build an innovation-forward community along Toronto's waterfront. Developed alongside designs by starchitecture firms Snøhetta and Heatherwick Studios, the idea behind the mini smart city is to integrate cutting-edge... View full entry
Yet what has drawn the most concern and curiosity with regards to Quayside is a uniquely 21st-century feature: a data-harvesting, wifi-beaming “digital layer” that would underpin each proposed facet of Quayside life. According to Sidewalk Labs, this would provide “a single unified source of information about what is going on”—to an astonishing level of detail—as well as a centralized platform for efficiently managing it all. — City Lab
While tech companies struggle to discover the new way to get a glimpse into our daily habits—attempting to discover how and where we spend our time and money—Alphabet might have just brought the ‘Truman Show’ approach to marketing. With Sidewalk Labs, a subsidiary of Alphabet, announcing... View full entry
Silicon Valley, and the tech industry at large, is known for reinventing the everyday. From buses to vending machines, and from the necessary to the indulgent, each week seems to bring another headline about the tech world's disruptions. Amazon has recently comprised a good sum of this ink with... View full entry
If you draw by hand and want that authentic, angular all-caps architectural lettered look for the text on your drawings, this straightforward video breaks down how to create all 26 letters of the alphabet. Get ready to learn about "dynamic angles" and suggested connections: View full entry
Google parent Alphabet is spinning off a little-known unit working on geothermal power called Dandelion, which will begin offering residential energy services. [...]
Dandelion chief executive Kathy Hannun said her team had been working for several years "to make it easier and more affordable to heat and cool homes with the clean, free, abundant, and renewable energy source right under our feet," and that the efforts culminated with the creation of an independent company outside of Alphabet.
— phys.org
"In the U.S., buildings account for 39% of all carbon emissions, mostly from the combustion of fossil fuels for heating and cooling," Dandelion CEO Kathy Hannun explains on the company's blog. "In the Northeast, heating and cooling is particularly carbon-intensive due to the relatively high use of... View full entry
Sidewalk Labs, a secretive subsidiary of Alphabet, wants to radically overhaul public parking and transportation in American cities, emails and documents obtained by the Guardian reveal.
Its high-tech services, which it calls “new superpowers to extend access and mobility”, could make it easier to drive and park in cities and create hybrid public/private transit options that rely heavily on ride-share services such as Uber.
— the Guardian
"But they might also gut traditional bus services and require cities to invest heavily in Google’s own technologies, experts fear."In related news:Google's Sidewalk Labs contemplates building an entire cityU.S. says computers qualify as drivers in Google's autonomous vehicles; won't even have to... View full entry
The pilot program is limited to about 25,000 employees of companies including Walmart and Adobe Systems... Waze will match riders with drivers already heading along similar routes during the morning and evening rush hours. [...]
Waze Carpool is charging riders just $0.54 a mile, which is also what the IRS recommends companies reimburse their employees per mile for business-related travel. “Waze Carpool focuses on covering costs, not generating an income,” the company explains.
— qz.com
Google purchased Waze, the Israeli GPS-based navigation system with real-time travel details submitted by users, in 2013 for $1.15B. With a fleet of already operating autonomous vehicles, Google stands to leverage its Waze transit data in big ways for an autonomous taxi service that could hit... View full entry
The Information notes that building a city could allow Sidewalk Labs to “rethink government, social policy, and data-driven management.” [CEO Dan] Doctoroff explained that “thinking about a city from the Internet up is really compelling,” while also noting that “cities are hard. You have people with vested interest, politics, physical space…But the technology ultimately cannot be stopped.” — 9 to 5 Google
Alphabet's Sidewalk Labs joins the rarefied stable of companies potentially looking to expand from an initial service (in this case, improved WiFi access and traffic flow in cities) into a fully-fledged social experimentation machine. Will they build 21st century company towns or create a... View full entry
Architect and graphic designer Federico Babina has become popular for his whimsical illustration series that fuse together his love for architecture and drawing. This includes his "Archibet" series, where famous modernist and contemporary architects like Alvar Aalto, Luis Barragán, Herzog de... View full entry
The Barcelona-based illustrator responsible for Archicine and Archipixel, Federico Babina, has created a whimsical alphabet in the style of 26 particularly inspiring architects. For Archibet, Babina modeled each letter after an architect with that shared initial. The Guggenheim wraps... View full entry
This work is an alphabetical list of the most important architects with their best known building.
A lot of them have been left out with grief because we only need one for each letter and we done an effort to have differents nationalities.
— vimeo.com
