As part of their regional work for the Smart Cities projects, researchers at Edinburgh Napier developed a customisation process that can monitor and evaluate the consumption of energy and carbon emissions involved in retrofit proposals for housing stock.

The aim of the DANS Cluster Kick-off conference is to bring the Digital Agenda for Europe to a more regional level and to show how activities and projects implemented in the frame of the Interreg North Sea Region Programme can contribute to it.

On September 13-15 2011 the Smart Cities project held a three-day conference in Brussels to explore how cities can develop and deliver better e-services to citizens and businesses.

Bremerhaven, September 2011. The functionality of the ten outdoor info terminals equipped with bluetooth-technology were exemplarily tested at the central location „Hafeninsel“. From June to August 2011, 26 test persons participated in the questionnaire survey with their personal mobile phones. The participants were tourists and citizens of Bremerhaven.

European Service and Function Lists produced by the Smart Cities project were launched and demonstrated at the project's Conference in Brussels on 14 September 2011 as part of the esd-toolkit.eu website.

Last week the Smart Cities project was ceremoniously closed during a 3-day final conference. More than 200 participants from 16 countries listened to the best strategies and practices for the development of personalized and user-oriented services.

Do you know your business and e-service solutions? Is your IT aligned with your business to support, enable and deliver your services? Your business processes define your ability and potential to provide customers and employees with effective and high quality services and solutions. Your processes influence your performance, your service delivery and what administrative support is available for your service offerings.

This document outlines a model, or framework, which can help you to improve your existing business processes to support and develop your e-services. The Common Process Model comprises a set of preconditions, directives, guidelines and templates that will help employees in different roles to identify, measure and improve the performance of the business processes that make up your e-service solutions.

E-government operations require citizens and external organisations to receive appropriate e-services, delivered by an organisation’s automated business processes and supported by information and communication technologies (ICT). This area of service management can be reinforced and strengthened, however, by using architectures: business architectures, information systems architectures, technology architectures and the processes used to produce them.

Across Europe municipalities are facing a wide range of challenges as businesses and citizens demand better, more efficient and more flexible services. Municipalities are working hard to become more customer-driven, and to change how they deliver services to respond better to their customers’ demands.

Bremerhaven, August 2011. At the Steering Committee Meeting this May in Bremerhaven the Bluetooth and WLAN- activities, the components of the work packages from the Smart Cities project (WP3 and WP4) were visited and presented in the context of the entire touristic information system for Bremerhaven.