Bike Powerrr

What We're Clicking On – January 9th, 2019

As we did last year, we will continue in 2019 to share our weekly news filter ‘What We’re Clicking On’ with the most interesting articles relating to the future of technology in cities, buildings and interiors.

What if people’s daily bike rides through cities like Amsterdam could generate power.  S-park is a system, developed by Amsterdam based creatives Guillaume Roukhomovsky and Blaž Verhnjak, that lets bicycles generate electricity from communal bikes. When cycling, the front wheel stores kinetic energy. When at the end of the day, the bikes are stored, the bike is connected to the grid and the electricity  can be used for example for street lighting. With a rack of 30 bikes that have been used each for 2.2 miles of commuting, 1 KwH can be generated per day. The next step would be to connect the bikes to the household grid, which will make people more conscious of their electricity use.
S-Park has already been tested by PaveGen in four projects in the U.S. and has been introduced as part of the Human Power Plant, a project of the University of Utrecht. S-Park’s fits Amsterdam’s ambition to invest 100 M USD in biking infrastructure by 2020.
Read more on Pop Up City

As part of its Sustainability Action Agenda, the city of Detroit partnered up with coUrbanize, a tech startup specialized in online community engagement, to create a digital interactive map in which citizens can pin comments on site specific issues and give their input on sustainability topics in their city. The map stimulates in-person engagement between citizens and the city government. The city will now collect and examine the feedback prior to the release of Detroit’s Sustainability Plan in April.
Read more on Next City or check out the map here

 

Facebook has filed a patent application for a technology, Buzzfeed News discovered, that can predict the next location users of the platform will be going. The predictions are based on two kinds of data: your own previously logged locations and other people’s locations.
Based on your own previous patterns, such as going to the supermarket after spending a day at work, the application will be able to show you content provided by the supermarket, such as daily deals.
Interestingly, Facebook will use data from other users to predict your next move. To do so, it will specifically look at users with a similar profile, for example users that have the same age, or share the same interests. Besides, it will take into account the data from the people you are connected with. If the application predicts it is likely for ‘your kind of profile’ to visit a specific bar after going to a specific restaurant, it could show you the drink menu before you even knew you were going there. Besides for advertisers, these kinds of applications can also be interesting for cities to map and change citizens’ behavior and traffic flows.
Read more on Engadget