King Abdullah Economic City (KAEC) is piloting a smart city app, touted as the most the most comprehensive green smart city mobile app, to provide an innovative tool for the city’s businesses and residences to find products, services, and aggregated purchasing opportunities.
The app called ‘KAEC for All’ was developed by GreenStar Hub (GSH), a US-based company which offers a group-buy marketplace for sustainable products and services, in response to KAEC’s mobile app challenge. GSH’s KAEC for All app won the “Best Overall” award among 29 other entrants from around the world.
KAEC for All is expected to provide information and reporting that will improve the environmental and economic health of the city and its residents. With business-to-consumer features like a business directory, calendar events, job openings, transportation information, permit statuses, and marketplace, the app brings a new level of useful comprehensive solutions and data-sharing to smart cities.
The smart city app also provides business-to-government features such as: eGov services, tenders, ideas and problems submission, citywide microblogging, community buying, discussion forum, Industrial Valley/Port/Residential project information, green policies, and geo-tagged nearby businesses. The app has enabled technologies to accommodate for ECA eGov services for real-time application and status tracking.
“As KAEC is already a leader in the development of smart cities, we are thrilled to be able to implement what has already been called ‘the most comprehensive green smart city mobile app ever built’,” said Fahd Al-Rasheed, Managing Director and CEO of KAEC. “It will be a tremendously useful tool in making KAEC the premier living destination in the Kingdom.”
“With a sound communications infrastructure already in place, GreenStar Hub saw the opportunity to develop an app that could use what was already in place to bring services directly to the hands of residents and business owners,” added Fahd Hamidaddin, Head of Marketing, Communications and Sustainability at KAEC and the App Challenge Judge.
King Abdullah Economic City (KAEC) was founded by King Abdullah in 2006. With a total development area of 181 km, the city is located along the coast of the Red Sea. The total cost of the city is expected above $86bn.
Going forward, GSH hopes to collaborate with the Saudi government’s Economic Cities Authority (ECA), Emaar, private businesses, and smart city technology leaders (IBM, Cisco, Microsoft, and others) to integrate GSH’s technology platform into KAEC’s supporting smart city infrastructure.