Every city wants to be a high tech hub.
Amazon announced recently that it was looking for a second home for itself in the form of a $5bn development somewhere in North America. Hundreds of cities made a pitch for the company – aware that it might bring up to 50,000 high paying jobs, along with plenty of good publicity.
Here we look at four cities we have featured recently on Business Traveller – all with high-tech sectors, and all seeking to forge new identies for themselves.
Boston
Boston is consistently ranked amongst the smartest cities in America, with universities like Harvard and MIT based in the city along with biotech, robotics, algorithm and enterprise software. In this piece from the first edition of Business Traveller TV, we look at the appeal of Boston as a high-tech hub.
Stockholm
“Patrick Mesterton has a microchip embedded in his hand. The chief executive of Epicentre, Stockholm’s first “house of innovation”, he was one of 60 members to voluntarily have RFID (radio frequency identification) tags implanted into their bodies last year. The size of a grain of rice, they are inserted under the skin with a syringe. “It hurt,” Mesterton says…..”
Zurich: Machine learning
“There is something uncanny about the way this dog-like robot moves – its skeletal frame whirs loudly as it marches on the spot, then moves side to side, and around in a circle in a strange dance. Built by a team in the Robotic Systems Lab at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich), assistant professor Marco Hutter says the “ANYmal” is his newest creation….”
Paris: Towering Ambition
“I’m not a fan of heights, but every now and then it’s important to get yourself into a glass lift and see the views. Looming 111 metres high, La Grande Arche is La Défense’s most familiar landmark; a monolithic open-sided cube, with an 11,000 sqm, newly renovated roof that allows you to gaze all the way down Avenue Charles de Gaulle to the Arc du Triomphe, on the other side of the River Seine….”