The site’s main goals are to strengthen the UK city’s innovation community by forming new relationships and economic opportunities, as well as to serve as a platform for exchanging information and ideas. Newcastle City Council has launched a website to highlight the city’s smart and sustainable development efforts. By forming new relationships and business opportunities, the site intends to improve the city’s innovation community.
Ncleus.com is the result of a smart city partnership between Newcastle City Council and innovation firm Urban Foresight. Over the previous two years, the alliance has created more than 25 projects aimed at improving public sector efficiency and effectiveness.
This includes a city-wide trial of shared electric scooters and the use of digital technologies to assist vulnerable adults in becoming more self-sufficient in their own homes.
Ncleus also features university research, such as cargo-carrying robots for senior citizens, and the Urban Observatory, which claims to have the UK’s largest database of publicly available real-time data.
“Newcastle has a proud history of exporting world-changing ideas and innovations. Today the city is embracing technology, data, and new ways of working to deliver better services and improve people’s lives,” said councilor Ged Bell of Newcastle City Council.
The website includes a database of smart businesses in Newcastle, as well as blogs from companies such as Algorithm People, ProxiSmart, NBS, and Grid Smarter Cities. Newcastle was named UK Smart City of the Year 2019 by Connected Britain’s Smart City Initiative 2020, and it is now ranked 23rd in the global IMD Smart City ranking.
