Do you think, while wagering on the latest video poker games at the Slotoro Casino, that this could be your luckiest day as a gambler? The enhanced safety and security, seamless payment systems, and constant landing on promotional offers and bonuses make it seem like perhaps this world is crafted around you and your preferences. Well, it is.
While online gambling has always introduced revolutionary and disruptive innovations since the early 1990s, especially in American and European countries, the merits of convenience, security, and personalized products and services make more sense than ever. These are all the fruits of the same machine learning and data analytics technology that power smart cities.
Welcome to the world of IoT and artificial intelligence. It leaves a deep impact on modern life through the integration of experience and technology. From housing designs, appliances, electronics, and lights to cars and even online gambling, the concept of smart or intelligent has emerged as a beacon of progress, transforming urban spaces into globalized centers.
What Are Smart Cities, and What Are Their Core Elements?
A smart city is a region, borough, or town that capitalizes on digitally integrated infrastructure and civil planning for improved living standards. Contrary to popular belief, it is not all about posh homes, clean streets, and technological advancement.
Even though shaped by digitization and robust IT connectivity, intelligence is a paradigm shift, with the ultimate goal of stabilizing social, economic, and environmental balance for the present and the future. Smart City is a city that has all the following features in one place:
- Intelligent Housing: Housing is foundational to urban development, and intelligent homes are paramount in bringing energy efficiency, a lower carbon footprint, and improved waste management systems by instilling convenience, affordability, and lifestyle amid rapid urbanization;
- Safe Water Supply: From drinking water to sanitation, it is a priority to ensure a safe water supply to everyone, more sustainable water drainage, and wastewater management while also conserving the natural groundwater in the process;
- Low-Carbon Public Transport: This point is about avoiding own car usage without an urgent necessity and using public transport instead. From implementing eco-friendly electric vehicles (EVs) to building bicycle corridors along commuting routes, these little changes ensure less traffic congestion and reduced pollution;
- Electronic Governance: The idea behind electronic governance, or eGovernance, is to distribute public services, official information, and communications equally to the masses. It works with strategic digital intervention and the implementation of IT solutions. It is to conglomerate and organize different levels of inter-state and inter-jurisdiction affiliations and different social, economic, and political initiatives into a more solidified goal with reduced conflict of interest;
- Access to Quality Healthcare: When people can monitor their health on smartphones, gaining easier and more affordable access to preventive healthcare or seamless insurance claims, keeping healthy and overall wellness becomes more common;
- Green Technology: From electronic cars to solar PV systems for solar electricity, green technology is the driving force for urban planning to reduce environmental impact in all aspects of life.
The Concept of Smart Nations
Have you wondered why it cannot be a smart nation, and only cities are mostly heard of? Well, that is not entirely true. The Singapore government’s initiative “Smart Nation,” which was introduced in 2014 and led by then Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, is one stark example.
The initiative aimed to conglomerate a range of intelligence-oriented solutions to improve certain accessibility on a national level. The most significant feature of this project was to make cashless transactions more widespread in Singapore. Citizens could use their MasterCard to pay for public transport, and intelligent ubiquitous surveillance systems were implemented to make streets and public places safer across the nation. All these improvements placed Singapore at the top position of 2017’s Global Smart City Performance Index, as declared by authoritative bodies like Intel and Jupiter.
There is still a long way to go. According to scholarly interpretation, so-called intelligent cities are still part of a country. The progress of one municipality, town, or borough cannot separate its entity from that of the country’s global status.
Changes are not only brought on by technology integration; they also require the integration of traditional and modern ideas, accessibility, and understanding. As much as technological advances stream into urban living, to pursue the big change, the advancements have to be implemented on a granular level and phased out to make it easier for people from different age groups and physical and mental capacities to get used to them. There have to be more towns and municipalities pursuing breakthrough initiatives to create an interconnected trajectory to represent a nation in a more whole-hearted way.
Resolute Standards of Sustainability That Enhance the Efficiency of Smart Living
The cornerstone of intelligent city initiatives is lifestyle sustainability. The idea involves every aspect of human existence being in sync with biodiversity. From making our gadgets less hazardous to opening up to breakthrough concepts like vertical agriculture or solar-powered skyscrapers, everything is possible in this paradigm. Governments have a big challenge to rethink traditional infrastructure as boldly as disruptive innovators can. Only when the standards of sustainability become more clear and more resolute can we finally call it smart urbanization.
