News

Last year, Cities named ten of its favorite metro datasets of 2011 from cities across North America, illustrating the breadth of what we might learn (regarding mosquito traps! misplaced vehicles! energy consumption!) in the still relatively young field of urban open data. For this year's installment, we're going one step further... Read More »

Imagine waking up just after midnight to a sky so bright you swear it must be early morning. Imagine seeing the Northern Lights as far south as Cuba or Hawaii. Imagine that the same phenomena behind both has also generated electric fields in the ground strong enough to power small electronics. That's what happened in 1859, when the earth was struck by the most severe geomagnetic storm ever recorded. Read More »

The new strain of bird flu infecting and killing people in China is on the move. All of the reported cases had been contained to a relative few hotspots, but the first reported case of a human infection outside mainland China arrived Wednesday, and that's got the world's top scientists pretty worried about this H7N9 strain—even if it's not being transmitted from person to person. Read More »

At its core, the blockchain is a technology that permanently records transactions in a way that cannot be later erased but can only be sequentially updated, in essence keeping a never-ending historical trail. This seemingly simple functional description has gargantuan implications. It is making us rethink the old ways of creating transactions, storing data, and moving assets, and that’s only the beginning. The blockchain cannot be described just as a revolution. It is a tsunami-like phenomenon, slowly advancing and gradually enveloping everything along its way by the force of its progression. Plainly, it is the second significant overlay on top of the Internet, just as the Web was that first layer back in 1990. That new layer is mostly about trust, so we could call it the trust layer.

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"You've been blown up, dude." Those were the first words Corporal Toran Gaal heard upon awaking from a coma in a hospital bed in Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. Gaal was grateful that his brother, a former Marine, was so blunt... Read More »

We’re very excited to announce that BRCK is spinning out as a company of its own, as was the plan from the beginning of the year. It’s interesting how Ushahidi has incubated or catalyze a number of things over the last 5 years, from the iHub and BRCK, to helping start CrisisMappers. A pattern that we hope continues. Read More »

Despite the proliferation of increasingly sophisticated connected car platforms, those systems remain largely closed to developers due to safe driving concerns. While those platforms will eventually open up, automakers have to be wary of placing too many limitations on development today. Otherwise consumers will ignore them. Read More »