Amazon.com Inc.'s three Central Ohio data centers for cloud computing and storage are operational as of this week, the company and state officials said Monday.

The Amazon Web Services centers in Dublin, Hilliard and New Albany are among 38 data center campuses – Amazon calls them "availability zones" consisting of one or more buildings – in 14 geographic regions globally; four more regions are set for launch this year.

The Dutch city of Eindhoven is introducing participatory planning that will allow its residents to be part of a new 15-year smart city project.

Called, ‘Roadmap Urban Lighting Eindhoven 2030’, it includes the development of new lighting applications in public spaces, such as connected LED street lighting, and the maintenance and management of public lighting in the municipality. The consortium starts work in the autumn of 2016 in five selected pilot areas across the city.

More and more of us are switching to LED bulbs in our homes - now a Queensland research team led by QUT scientists wants Australia's street lights to be switched over to LEDs.

A 12-month LED street lighting trial in Brisbane, Ipswich and Townsville has just wrapped up, with great results for the environment and the public purse.

(19 October 2016 – New York City & Niagara Falls, ON, Canada) - The Intelligent Community Forum (ICF) today named the world’s Smart21 Communities of 2017.  This select group of communities, which emerged from a group of nearly 400, will now move on and remain in contention for the prestigious designation of an Intelligent Community Top7, to be named in Taipei, Taiwan in February 2017.  One of the seven will then be named Intelligent Community of the Year at the Intelligent Community Summit and Awards Dinner in New York on June 8, 2017.   www.intelligentcommunity.org/summit

As Montreal's original Metro cars are being gradually pulled out of service, at least a few of the 50-year-old cars will be getting second lives.

As part of an event celebrating the Metro's 50 years, the STM recently announced seven projects it has tentatively approved after putting out a call for proposals this spring.

There is a small ray of light in this dark American election season. The Presidential contenders actually agree on something: the need to bring back manufacturing in America. To quote from an editorial by Binyamin Applebaum:

Trump’s keynote proposal is to encourage domestic production by taxing imports — an idea more likely to cause a recession than a manufacturing revival. Clinton is promising to basically extend the efforts of the Obama administration, which said it would create a million factory jobs. With just a few months left, the president is still more than 600,000 jobs short.

TAIPEI--Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je said Thursday that he considers the Netherlands to be an excellent model for Taipei to learn from and plans to visit the country next year.

Shortly after winning the mayoral election in November 2014, Ko said Taipei would overtake Singapore within eight years, but changed his mind after six months in office.

Big Data is big business. But what difference does it really make in the cities, suburbs and towns where we make our homes? Does the Big Data future belong entirely to the big tech companies like Google and Facebook? Or are there benefits that matter to the rest of us in the place called home? Robert Bell is a co-founder of the Intelligent Community Forum and co-author of Brain Gain: How Innovative Cities Create Job Growth in an Age of Disruption and he joins Carol Maresca and Corey Johnson to talk about it.

Last week 192 nations were in New York sorting through the world’s problems, while I was trying to sort through the traffic jams they were creating in my world: the streets of New York. When the peacemakers come to town, blessed though they may be, our traffic gets miserable. However, as the home of the United Nations, we live with the hope that we are hosting people who will make the world safer and happier – or at least happier than my taxi driver.

But for the record, 85% of my trips around the city were via public transit. Blessed be IT! Let us have more of it.

Since Estonia’s capital started providing free public transport for residents in 2013, it claims to have turned a €20m a year profit each year. But has the scheme achieved its ambitions of reducing traffic and saving people money?

In London a monthly travel card for the whole city costs almost £200. In Copenhagen, a city a fraction of the size, you’ll pay £160. So when you ask the residents of Tallinn about the benefits of free travel across the city, it’s a surprise to be met with a roll of the eyes or a sarcastic smile.