Monthly Archives: January 2012

PlaceMatters Blog Roundup: January 18, 2012

OpenIdeo is poised to announce the winner of their “restoring vibrancy to cities” crowdsourced challenge, winnowing down an initial list of 331 concepts to a short list of 20 finalists and now to a single winner. YPulse reports on Sesame Street’s new augmented reality app unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show last week. Civic Commons [...]

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Welcome Brad Barnett to the Team!

We are very excited to have someone new join our team here in Denver as our new Planning Analyst! We were immensely pleased with the caliber of the applicants to our GIS and Scenario Planning Analyst last fall, but Brad Barnett stood out even in such a strong field … he really impressed us and we [...]

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Most Exciting Trends in 2012: Mobile, Social, and Local

Five trends I’m excited about for 2012: 1) Mobile Everything It’ll all be about mobile in 2012. Smartphone sales continue to grow, and consumers are increasingly shifting from PC-based web activity to using smartphones. Because of the pervasiveness of mobile devices and the growing sophistication of both native and HTML-based apps, many of the tools [...]

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Most Exciting Trends in 2012: Sustainability, Equity, Transparency

2012 could be the end of the world as we know it. Or not. Either way, some things definitely will be ending–for example, funding for the Sustainable Communities Initiative program hasn’t been renewed for 2013.  Despite the end of funding this year, or perhaps because of it, I’ll point again this year (as I did [...]

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Most Exciting Trends in 2012: Big Data, Collaborative Problem Solving

Big Data, Big Business 
Decision support systems that take massive data sets from multiple public and private entities and synthesize the data into valuable cross-discipline information for city and regional decision making is clearly becoming big business. Television, online, and magazine ads are populated with ads from IBM, Cisco, and Siemens, to name a few, [...]

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Most Exciting Trends in 2012: Better Data and Apps for Planners

This past year, we’ve seen the growth of community decision making tools around planning.  In my estimation, 2012 will continue this trend and bring more usable, integrated apps to the world of community decision making, giving planners and community leaders a broader and more efficient toolkit for engaging stakeholders in a decision-making process. In the [...]

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Looking Back at 2011: Augmented Reality, Mobile, and Regional Sustainability Planning

Way back in January of 2011, I asked my colleagues here at PlaceMatters what they were most excited about for the new year. Here’s a quick look at how our expectations for 2011 tracked to what the year actually held: Ken was excited about how the rumored addition of a camera on the new iPad [...]

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PlaceMatters Blog Roundup: January 5, 2012

TechCrunch reports on a seriously cool new augmented reality application: instant translation of foreign-language text. It’s not hard to imagine how useful a tool like this might be for community decision-making efforts in mixed language communities. Cooltown Studios describes Popularise, an unusual private sector approach to crowdsourcing development plans. I’m not convinced the “long tail” [...]

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