Dear Green Place to become Dear Smart Place

Glasgow has won a £24m UK government grant intended to make it one of the UK's first smart cities. It will use the money on projects to demonstrate how a city of the future might work. They will include better services for Glaswegians, with real-time information about traffic and apps to check that buses and trains are on time. The council will also create an app for reporting issues such as potholes and missing bin collections. This could be a very handy service for Glasgow, or any city for that matter. And Glasgow will not be the UK's only smart city - others including Birmingham, Sunderland, and London are beginning to roll out technologies to make services work more smartly. And speaking of smart, Google is reportedly looking to bring a smart watch to market. That’s not too hard to believe when you consider it already has one that few people know about. However, I will not be blowing my money on one of those unless Apple makes one. And now would be a perfect time to investigate that idea because Apple’s continuing stock dive has taken one feather out of the company’s cap: The firm no longer holds its title as the world’s most valuable company, which it earned in 2011 after jockeying with oil giant ExxonMobil for the distinction of having the largest market capitalization of any publicly traded company. When Apple’s stock soared to $500, $600, and even $700 in 2012, it seemed to have cemented the title for the long haul. But their value has now dropped below Exxon’s again, to roughly $414 billion vs. the oil company’s $417 billion.