Technology

Imagine this scenario: Building designers are trying to figure out why pedestrian traffic at one spot in an airport terminal past the security checkpoints is consistently snarled. A decade or two ago, the designers might sit in the terminal, counting passengers with a clicker, and trying to get a select sample to answer a few […]

This story is part of the Transit Time newsletter, a partnership between the Urban Institute, the Charlotte Ledger and WFAE. Find out more and subscribe here. Charlotte plans to spend billions of dollars over the next two decades building new rail lines, a better bus system, greenways and roads. But in an age of self-driving […]

How do you plan for the future and dream big while attending to the pressing needs of the day? It’s a question that came up pointedly during Charlotte City Council’s annual planning retreat this week. With 385,000 people projected to move to Charlotte over the next couple decades, the city is grappling with increasing congestion […]

How do we use maps in the modern world? Your smart phone, GPS, digital camera and daily weather report all use modern versions of maps called geographic information systems. GIS day is an event that helps explain the growing importance of this technology in daily life. Want to attend? Location: Spirit Square Center for the […]

TORONTO – Maybe the game-changer is 3-D printing. Or maybe it’s robotic cars and “autonomous driving,” an innovation that may well mean we’ll never again have to learn to parallel park. Maybe it’s “the Internet of everything” – the idea that sooner or later almost everything will be connected via the Internet. It’s obvious big […]

In January, Charlotte had 1.8 million people. Today it has 2.3 million people. And no, there was no airlift of half a million residents from the Rust Belt or anywhere else. How can a city gain a half-million people almost overnight? How can a metro area vault from No. 33 in population to No. 23? […]

“In 1965, if you had a good back and a good alarm clock, you could make a good living in Milwaukee,” Mayor Tom Barrett told a recent Raleigh conference, because of the strength, at the time, of that city’s manufacturing sector. Although rural Stanly County is very different, that Milwaukee attitude was also the prevailing […]

The emergence of the biotechnology sector was not due to luck, rather it was due to vision, the ability to see the invisible and do the impossible. Our state prepared for success by investing in roads, K-12 education, community colleges, universities, research, innovation, business parks and biotechnology agencies (e.g. BioNetwork, NC Biotechnology Center and the […]

A few weeks ago, UNC Charlotte hosted the ninth annual Charlotte Biotechnology Conference. The original idea for this event was that it serve as a barometer of the “life science cluster” in the Charlotte region. Sensing increased activity in patents and start-ups ten years ago, UNC Charlotte’s Office of Technology Transfer and the regional Small […]