In this episode of The Smart City Podcast, I interviewed serial hacker and fellow Smart Cities Council Emerging Innovator Angela Bee Chan. Angela is the CEO and Founder of Hackathons Australia and she tells us all about Hackathons and how they are connected with Smart Cities, which I really loved hearing about. We also have great chats about piloting technology in regional areas and the importance of bringing back connections to Australia to boost our eco-system. Angela also shares some insights into linking Smart Cities with educating the future workforce and sustainability.

Listen here:

Quotes: 

“for me Smart Cities is the future of how we work, live and play, and it really impacts everyone, everywhere”

“using Hackathons to build a Smart City so seeing how [Hackathons] can be integrated more into how we do things and how it shapes our cities is really interesting”

“A Hackathon is a 2-3 day creative, a very intensive session, where a diverse group of people come together to solve a problem using technology as an enabler. So it’s getting people that you don’t normally get together to collaborate with each other…to create awesome solutions”

“in terms of government and where we are heading, it’s definitely where we need to be at and there needs to be more activity to champion people like Catherine Ball, people like Steve Baxter who are passionate about what they are doing and using their connections and bringing that back into Australia”

“we really need to be understanding what our purpose is and why we are doing things…the more positive impact that we have, the better we service other people and improve the lives of everyone around us, and we should be using technology in that sense…to make a difference and make a sustainable change”

What we covered:

• Angela’s background in public relations then in IT and marketing and running Hackathons
• Hackathons Australia and running a Smart Cities hackathon
• Smart cities being the future of work, live and play
• Connecting devices, data and predictive analytics
• Smart homes and home automation for accessibility
• IoT and Artificial Intelligence
• Future Cities Project with WWF – IoT and blockchain
• Using Hackathons to build a Smart City
• Explaining what a Hackathon is – the hustler, hipster and hacker
• Learning about the developer community and being open
• Different objectives of Hackathons and how many are going on in Australia
• The relationship between Hackathons and Smart Cities
• Bring connections back to Australia for Smart Cities
• Piloting Smart Tech in regional areas and leveraging the amount of land we have
• Boosting our eco-system and experimenting
• Becoming leaders and being early adopters
• How we are equipping the next generation and using technology for sustainability

Links:

Hackathons Australia #HackAUS Twitter, Facebook  https://www.hackathonsaustralia.com

Schneider Electric https://www.schneider-electric.com/en/work/solutions/for-business/smart-cities/

Future Cities Project with WWF http://www.wwf.org.au/get-involved/futurecitiesproject#gs.GjZ=3wQ

Smart Cities Council ANZ https://anz.smartcitiescouncil.com

Smart Cities Council Emerging Innovators email, Twitter and Instagram

Transport of NSW https://www.transport.nsw.gov.au

Advance Queensland https://advance.qld.gov.au

Launch Vic https://launchvic.org

World of Drones Congress https://www.worldofdrones.com.au and Dr Catherine Ball https://www.drcatherineball.com

Steve Baxter https://www.stevebaxter.com.au

Elon Musk https://twitter.com/elonmusk

Connect:

Connect with me via email: hello@mysmart.community

Connect with My Smart Community via LinkedIn or Twitter and watch on YouTube

Podcast Production by Perk Digital