Startups in the Smart City area. Is that all you can do?

"Sadly." This is the word that came to my mind while browsing startups in the Smart City niche. A lot of variations on the topic of parking, a dozen concepts of data exchange from the field of internet of things and social networks, and everything else is some unintelligible nonsense. Are you guys serious?

In a nutshell, how this article appeared. I am interested in new technologies, inventions that change our daily lives. Here's the news on string theory, with all due respect to Hawking - not interesting. And, for example, the sensors that will turn on the lights on the road only when it is moving on it - very. To see what is so curious inventing at the moment, I decided to look through the projects on angel.co - a platform where every self-respecting start-up should publish information about himself (well, maybe not everyone, but there is the largest directory of startups I know - 16 thousand projects).

In the Smart City section under two hundred projects. Judging by the concentration of parking solutions - this is the only thing that prevents people in a modern city. Here we will park all the cars - here all happiness will come.
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Among others were found:

• wifi benches
• accounting holes on the road
• license plate recognizer
• fare in public transport from a smartphone,
• walking planner
• smartphone as a replacement for house keys,
• a couple of garbage management services,
• several communication services
• car sharing in different variations,
• Online Lost and Found
• tracking of stolen bicycles by wifi,
• cargo scooters (yes, yes!) and similar nonsense.

Not to say that these are definitely bad ideas, but they are, let's say, not at all impressive.

But from more or less interesting pieces:
Video from drones, which transmits a picture of the city from above in real time, for example, to special services or organizers of events. https://angel.co/transparent-sky (project site is so terrifying that you'd better leave a link to angel.co)


Beacons and binding to them information for smartphones. Including indoor navigation http://getifinity.com/


A device that reduces the level of external noise https://angel.co/voxi-2 . The idea, apparently, is still very raw, I did not find a separate project site, and “our people” from Israel make it.


Unrelated to the smart city, but for some reason the beautiful thing on the list is an autonomous capsule, a micro-house https://www.ecocapsule.sk/ It's funny, but useless.


The system showing the public transport load: http://opencapacity.co/ .


And here is the idea that I wrote about at the beginning of the note, light on demand: http://www.tvilight.com/


It turns out that exciting ideas, such as those “wow-awesome”, are critically few. As Sorg from the Fifth Element said, I'm very disappointed. By the way, this movie was shown stunning city of the future.

Maybe I was just looking there not? Tell me, what kind of super ideas of the “city of the future” did you come across?