Aside from the occasional ferry down from England, the old Spanish port city of Santander doesn’t get too many foreign visitors. So imagine the locals’ surprise when delegations from Google, Microsoft and the Japanese government all landed there recently, to literally walk the streets.
What they’ve been flocking to see is mostly invisible: 12,000 sensors buried under the asphalt, affixed to street lamps and atop city buses. The sensors measure everything from air pollution to where there are free parking spaces. They can even tell garbage collectors which dumpsters are full, and automatically dim street lights when no one is around.
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