Platforms for Smart Cities – connecting humans, infrastructure and industrial IT

Today's platforms have come a long way from being focused on technical aspects - improving the lives of engineers and developers - to powerful, socio-economic platforms affecting the daily lives of millions of users. These socio-economic platforms enable a new class of applications and services to emerge at an unprecedented speed, quality and cost. Cities and Urban Areas can increase their pace of innovation, while effort for planning and implementation can be reduced from timespans of years or even a decade to months. In this paper, we will show examples of such platforms and how they impact the communities they are implemented in.