London Technology Week is a golden opportunity to celebrate the capital city’s potential when it comes to technology. As a hub for the rest of the UK, a lot of initiatives that start in London significantly affect businesses across the rest of the country. Whatever your organisation is, be it a fleet service based in Birmingham, or a newly-established cobbler in Croydon, technology developments will affect your business in one way or another.
For three years London Technology Week (#LDNTechWeek) has hosted a series of events and workshops aimed at showcasing the city’s technology industry as well as encouraging others to take part in it. The beauty is that it is very inclusive, with many of the broad range of events free to attend. Mayor of London Sadiq Khan has given it his seal of approval saying: “London Technology Week shines a light on this hugely important sector of the economy and demonstrates how our city is open to trade, ideas and people from across the globe”.
Last week’s event has been discussed at length in articles, live feeds and on social media, and several particularly interesting areas to watch have become apparent…
Smart Cities and solutions
The vision of what cities could become is known as Smart or Future Cities. In the UK, London is well on the way to achieving this status, and Bristol is arguably even further ahead. To get there, managing a city’s assets is key, and therefore infrastructure was high on the agenda during the week.
Driverless cars were mentioned in the context of how they might alleviate traffic problems. Patrick Gleason – who helps companies set up and grow in London – tweeted: “#FutureCities might create self-driving car zones to reduce congestion and prevent accidents #LDNTechWeek”. If you own a fleet of cars or delivery service, you would need to consider investing in a fleet of driverless cars if such a scheme was rolled out. This would cut the time it takes employees to get to work or meetings dramatically.
Travel
Along with people-powered paving tiles and tracking health outbreaks using technology, finance and news company Bloomberg discussed transport at their inaugural BTech Conference. With travel apps such as CityMapper, GoogleMaps and Waze booming, there’s an incredible amount of knowledge you can get before you even set off. This is only set to get more detailed, allowing you to go beyond selecting price or time preferences and find out even more: right down into amount of time spent walking, the number of people on a bus and smart ways to change at stations. With this, your drivers will have even greater visibility of their route, and way ahead of hitting a traffic jam, they’ll know about it. Also, when you’re heading to meetings or expecting visitors, you’ll be able to know exact arrival times down to the second.
Analytics and collaboration
We’re all familiar with a frustrating commute – asking people to move down the train, crawling through city traffic at a snail’s pace and trying to find a parking space are just a few common experiences. While the growth of cities can mean more talent and more opportunity, it also means more people and a need to provide a comfortable environment for them. To alleviate potential problems that come with growth, collaboration is one of the biggest areas that needs to develop.
In order to improve transport and travel, car manufacturers, app developers and technology companies need to work together and form relationships. Partnering with leading global IT businesses, Kia are already working to revolutionise the driving experience with a fully-fledged ‘connected car’. Using the Internet of Things, Kia are working to make smart cars even more intelligent using their own corporate Cloud Centre. Two-way connectivity will transform the cars into a hub of infinite knowledge, significantly enhancing the lives of drivers and passengers. This kind of data could benefit your business by saving your drivers time and money – this could be used for anything from chasing new business to improving internal training.
As technology is breaking new ground constantly, there are challenges and barriers to be aware of, such as regulation, data protection and security. But that said, all of this is on the horizon, and by keeping up-to-date with the best technology developments, you can make sure that your business stays on top of them.
Content on this page is paid for and provided by Kia Fleet sponsor of the Guardian Small Business Network Accessing Expertise hub.
