The next phase of the smart city movement is already upon us. The move to make our cities more intelligent began with an IT-enabled, systems-driven approach: creating efficiencies through digitizing information, optimizing traffic systems, and using data-driven dashboards to aid decision making. But now, we're beginning to use new technologies to support the entrepreneurial, the spontaneous, the creative, and the humane.

This is the rise of the socially driven smart city...

To read the rest of this blog post visit our feature-post on the UBM Future Cities site

You may have seen the TED talk by the London based data journalist and information designer, David McCandless, where he states that "information is beautiful". Here at Re:Imagine Group we agree with this statement, but we think it needs to be taken one step further. We believe that "interaction with information should be beautiful", particularly when you are accessing information on-the-go. That is why we are launching a new project that uses augmented reality to make interacting with real-time bus information at the bus stop, easy and even delightful.

Many of us have experienced it: You're waiting for the bus, you own a smart phone and you want to know when the next bus is coming. If your city has a lot of money, they might have installed LED signs (costly, and quite frankly, ugly). If not, you are left with a number of apps and websites that will tell you when the bus is arriving.

The problem is, interacting with these sites and apps is not beautiful - you have to know the number of the bus you want, which stop you are at, where you need to go and you need to input all of this information on a tiny screen....