Why London is the tech city of the future

Hi-tech high street

The high street is set for a transformation with the rollout of Amazon Go, its new store in which you arrive, scan your phone and cameras around the store track the items you pick up. Gone is the cheery checkout man or woman. You are just blipped in and out.

IBM is trialling something similar in Holloway Road, at the Shell service station there, using radio frequency ID chips to track items as they move.

It’s not that technology does not already play a big part in the high street, through sorting out how to get the right orders into the shops to analysing all the digital data they can squeeze out of our loyalty cards, which create profiles of you as a consumer. But the advent of the digital has even more potential. For example, you could begin to look not at individuals but at whole trends of who buys what where, and why. If the IBM trial finds there is high demand for mung beans and less for sweetcorn, it could offer five varieties of the beans. A branded store could offer goods tailored to the area — M&S could find black T-shirts sell better in Camden and drop its white ones.

“The filter bubble” was the term coined by Eli Pariser to explain how news is delivered in a personalised package by Google and Facebook, which have interpreted our liberal or conservative biases. The same could happen with shopping experiences in physical stores — rather than supplying what you think customers might buy, you know what they want and fill shops accordingly. This is convenience raised to the next level.

The drive here is for the “seamless”, the buzzword of the past decade. Amazon Go gets rid of the inconvenience of queuing for checkouts, and even removing your wallet to pay.

It also makes the high street the chief means of distributing goods rather than the warehouse to front-door model. That model has one major problem: the cost of the last mile delivery through clogged streets, both environmental and financial. Far more convenient is to use existing shops as depots for desired goods and allow locals to use the most efficient form of transport: their feet.

There are other ways that the high street can supplement this. Parcel delivery service My Hermes is trialling ground robots that deliver small packages within a two-mile radius and connect with your smartphone to organise times.

Totally wired

5G is the future. City Hall is installing 500,000 brick-sized miniaturised mobile masts on lamp-posts and other public buildings to cope with “not-spot”: areas with little internet access. The ambition is to make London Europe’s biggest “gigabit city”, giving speeds of 1,000 megabits per second — fast enough to download an entire HD movie in seven seconds. “By 2026, the city’s digital infrastructure will be considered as important as any other major utility, such as water, electricity, and gas, with the number of personal digital devices having risen twelvefold”, says Theo Blackall, London’s first chief digital officer at City Hall.

He sees big data linking everything: better infrastructure planning in high density growth areas such as Rotherhithe and Hounslow; pop-up bus routes will be available via app, so that if people need a bus from Tooting to East Dulwich, one will be diverted like a big red Uber Pool; and smart gas metres like Google’s Nest being used alongside public data to reduce fuel poverty. The city’s private sector is set to capitalise on big data too: expect to see outdoor entertainment and gyms using air quality data to avoid pollution hotspots.

Big green taxis

City Hall has set a 2050 target of London becoming a zero carbon city. The maker of the black cab has unveiled an electric design which runs for about 70 miles off a battery before switching to petrol. The London Taxi Company —rechristened the London Electric Vehicle Company — has promised lower running costs, including a claimed £100 less on weekly fuel costs.

Charging forwards

TfL claim London is one of the world’s leading cities in the development of charging infrastructure for electric vehicles, despite difficulties in getting councils to sign up. Boroughs have also been given £4.5 million to install 2,000 more charging points on residential streets in the next three years.

On top of the 2,000 standard charging points London already has, there will be 150 rapid charging points (RCPs) operational by the end of next year and at least 300 by the end of 2020, with a significant proportion dedicated to taxis. These new RCPs take only 20 to 30 minutes to charge a vehicle, as opposed to four to eight hours on standard models.

Street lights connected to UK Power Networks electricity network in Kensington and Chelsea have already been converted into charge points for electric vehicles.