Starbucks, the Seattle-based coffee shop chain, may not have invented free Wi-Fi, but they sure did popularize it. Starbucks rolled out the service back in 2010, and since then so many restaurants have followed suit it feels at times that the U.S. is blanketed in Wi-Fi (it’s not). Starbucks’ influence extended to a subsequent and related …
Continue reading How to Force a Public Wi-Fi Login Page to Display
Cupertino, We Have a Problem — Actually, Make That Five. Prior to its launch, the iPhone X was being called “the most highly-anticipated version” of the phone to date, and with good reason. Almost two years before the iPhone X’s release, back when people still called it an iPhone 8, rumors of Apple’s plans for a major …
Continue reading Five Things Apple Got Wrong with the iPhone X (and How to Fix Them)
Metra commuters. (DePaul University/Jeff Carrion) With public-transit use riding a 58-year high of 10.8 billion trips last year, it only makes sense to ask: why? Technology may be partially responsible for public transit's record ridership, but probably not in the way you think. As smartphones and other electronic devices have skyrocketed in popularity, more people are becoming dependent on …
Continue reading Transit’s Surprising Advantage is Sitting Right in Your Pocket
It takes a certain amount of chutzpah to compete with the likes of Google, but that’s what a little start-up named Conveyal is doing. The firm creates digital tools to help transport authorities better communicate the wide array of available mobility options. Its new product is similar in functionality to Google Maps and the many consumer-based …
Continue reading Behind the Scenes of a Transportation Tech Start-Up
The bicycle was created in the 1800s, but technology is keeping it relevant with “hacks” – or solutions – designed to get more people to use bike helmets, count ridership better, and reduce the obstacles keeping people from biking. These and other innovations were on display at the latest Transportation Techies event: Bike Hack Night …
Continue reading Technology “Hacks” Solve Real-World Cycling Problems
“Does a city speak?” This provocative question – posed by Saskia Sassen (pictured above) – opened the recent Mobilities in Cities: From Visible to Invisible conference at Columbia University. It’s hard to deny that a city has life, but does it live and communicate? Sassen has explored these ideas before: the juxtaposition of technology – ephemeral, artificial, …
The Brookings Institution held a forum this week for urban planners, techies, and politicians on a topic that’s gained traction in recent years: “smart cities.” Cohosted by Barcelona’s ESADE Business School, Getting Smarter About Smart Cities included panelists from Barcelona, Amsterdam, Edmonton, and Arlington. A smart city is a term coined by IBM to describe a city that uses technology …
Continue reading Smart Cities Put People First, and People Want Technology
The word “innovative” isn’t usually used in the same sentence as Washington D.C., but that adjective is surprisingly apt today. The nation’s capital has flown under the radar to become one of the leaders in transportation innovation. Recently launched services such as Uber, Hailo, Capital Bikeshare, Hitch, and RidePost are changing the way Washingtonians get …
Continue reading Transportation Tech Bubble Makes D.C. “Ripe for Disruption”
One might expect the future of transportation to involve teleportation machines, but, at the recent “Outside the Box” competition, presenters were less “Back to the Future”-style flying skateboards than real-world innovations that could be actually implemented to solve transportation problems. The George Mason School of Public Policy hosted the event for students and young professionals …
Continue reading Pop-Up Buses, Cell-Phone Data are Big Winners at Transit Tech Competition
Mobility Lab’s Director Tom Fairchild served as a guest judge in Kaiser Permanente’s recent Code-a-Thon, a competition in which software developers from across the country traveled to the company’s state-of-the-art Center for Total Health in Washington D.C. The developers worked on different apps envisioned under Kaiser Permanente’s just-launched application programming interface (API) program called Interchange℠. …
Continue reading Connecting Data to Our Health: Kaiser’s Code-A-Thon
