TAIPEI: Bicycles that cost half the fare of a subway ride to rent. A 300-km cycling network and wider shared pavements. That’s how Taipei revolutionised its cycling culture in just eight years, cutting pollution and congestion in the city.

These days, the city is a fine representative of the “Bicycle Kingdom” – a moniker that Taiwan originally earned as the largest exporter of bikes in the world, but increasingly now, because of residents’ reliance on pedal power to get around.

Today in Tokyo, Premier Kathleen Wynne met with leaders from across Ontario and Japan to announce new business agreements valued at $120 million that are expected to deliver 170 jobs in Ontario.

Ontario and Japanese businesses and institutions announced 15 new business agreements and partnerships, including:

Dr. Roberto Gallardo (pictured right) of the Mississippi State University Extension Intelligent Community Institute has published a 50-state Digital Divide Index using data provided by the FCC.

The DDI is a county-level index score (from 0 to 100) measuring the digital divide. The higher the number, the larger the digital divide. The objective of the DDI is to serve as a descriptive and pragmatic tool for policymakers, community leaders, and residents. The DDI consists of two components: infrastructure/adoption and socioeconomic characteristics.

Every year in The Netherlands, Eindhoven turns into a vibrant open-air museum of light. The Glow Festival is a free public event that displays illuminated artworks throughout city parks, street alleys, and public buildings.

Like many, Dublin’s Tristan Stover, a Columbus State student who rides the bus to and from school every day, wants online access all the time.

That can be difficult for those who don’t pay extra for unlimited internet access on their smart phone or other devices and for those who ride public buses.

With a population under 70,000, Moncton, New Brunswick was originally known for its wine and food festivals as a tourist destination, and its location just a few miles from the beaches. But geographic positioning smack in the center of Canada’s Maritime Provinces and close to the Northumberland Strait, made it a strategic center for Internet traffic across the Atlantic Ocean.

Swedish capital Stockholm has been ranked among the finest cities in Europe for digital entrepreneurs in a new study, beating 58 other cities and trailing only one.

The European Digital City Index (EDCI) placed Stockholm second in Europe behind only London when it comes to supporting digital entrepreneurs. It was followed by Amsterdam in third, Helsinki in fourth, and Paris in fifth.

GOOGLE IS BUILDING a new artificial intelligence lab in Montreal dedicated to deep learning, a technology that’s rapidly reinventing not only Google but the rest of the internet’s biggest players.

Hugo Larochelle will run the new lab after joining Google from the Twitter, where he was part of the company’s central AI team. It’s a homecoming for Larochelle, who earned a PhD in machine learning from the University of Montreal and remains a professor at the Université de Sherbrooke. Yoshua Bengio, one of the founding fathers of the movement, calls him “one of the rising stars of deep learning.”

In 2011, Eindhoven was selected by ICF as the Intelligent Community of the Year. It is globally renowned for its smart mobility efforts. It includes a diverse set of mobility options for its citizens including a unique raised “hovering” bicycle roundabout and street lighting and traffic signals dedicated to bicycles throughout the city and region. The city centre also includes a significant pedestrian area. Eindhoven’s Automotive Technology Centre involves over 125 organizations in collaborative projects ranging from start-up of new high-tech mobility systems to ICT companies, stimulated by being involved with the region’s incubators. The Centre for Automotive Research in the Auto Campus has had a driverless bus, called Phileas, navigate parts of Eindhoven since the late 1990s. As a smart mobility bus rapid transit system, it is intended to deliver tram-like public transport at a very low cost because of low maintenance, lack of rails, no overhead lines and the ability to recharge the battery by means of electromagnetic induction. It has had commercial success in places like Korea, Turkey and Israel. More recently, WePods are being experimented within neighbouring towns on public roads.

The Liquor Control Board of Ontario, the government agency that manages alcohol sales across the province, is tapping into Kitchener-Waterloo’s startup community as it seeks to modernize the way it interacts with customers at its retail stores.

Even though the LCBO already has an innovation lab at its downtown Toronto headquarters, the scope of development there has been limited because of what the LCBO admits is a lagging approach to problem-solving.