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.

Stockholm is already one of the greenest cities in the world - but it won't stop there. Find out how the city's tech scene is transforming the energy sector.

In 2001 we established five ways that a community, whether large or small, could reconnect itself after the separation that occurred worldwide in the post-industrial economy. Among the five, the fourth was “Digital Democracy,” now known by us and communities as “Digital Equity.” It is simple to explain but hard to achieve (evidently). It means simply that, as in the great moral mandate of our species, we leave no one behind. In our case, we urged that all communities find ways to ensure that all of their population, rural or ex-urban or dense city blocks, be given access to the global economy. For it is in the “global economy” where opportunities, ideas and vast treasures and muck proliferate in ways that can rebuild our local places.

Like Columbus, Toronto, Ontario in Canada is a community that is part of the Great Lakes and North American rust belt, having been negatively impacted by massive manufacturing decline in the later 1900’s. Like Columbus, Toronto has leveraged education, enlightened civic institutions and private sector innovation to transform its city core, waterfront and now its entire Greater Toronto Area (GTA) for the digital era.