Almost as soon as I arrived in Taipei to cover the world’s second largest smart-cities conference, I was treated to an unplanned demonstration of the power of these technologies to meet citizens’ needs.

On my first night, after ordering food to go near the Zhongxiao Fuxing Station, a friend and I returned via cab to my hotel to catch up and eat.

We’d been chatting for half an hour when we began comparing the populations of Taipei and Atlanta, so I went to grab my phone to look up the numbers, only to find that it was nowhere to be found.

After some frantic retracing, we deduced that I’d left it in a local cab, about which we had basically no information. I began kicking myself that we hadn’t used Uber.

While we could track the phone moving through Taipei using the location pin shared with my husband, I was fully resigned to it being gone. If you lose your phone in the U.S. and over half an hour elapses, you know you’ll never see it again.

Read the full story at globalatlanta.com.