Reverse pitch competitions are rapidly growing in popularity within the US Ignite Smart Gigabit Communities (SGC) network. These are competitions where a community announces a challenge or challenges it would like to solve, and then asks for participants to submit applications as solutions. There’s prize money involved, and a healthy dose of collaboration between community leaders and applicati…

One of the big innovations of the Internet protocols was its survivability—its ability to keep data flowing even when there were failures or disruptions in the underlying communications links. This was of intense interest to the Department of Defense and their Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) which sponsored the research that resulted in the Internet. But in making the Internet mor…

One of the biggest challenges we hear about from both municipal governments and the corporate sector when it comes to public-private partnerships (P3s) is the sticky issue of procurement processes. Local governments are used to buying one way, and companies are used to selling another. The problem isn’t just around contract and pricing requirements. With the emergence of smart city initiative…

We’re in the “get creative” stage of smart city project financing. Given the variety of regulatory environments and resources available across the country, there simply isn’t a single, predominant funding strategy, and there won’t be for some time to come. However, the lack of a single solution means that several different strategies are flourishing. At our recent US Ignite For…