Trendexplosion

A trend in Amsterdam is to carry everything with your bike. The Dutch bakfiets is the best possibility to bring objects from one place to another. If furniture, groceries, pets or even children, Dutch people carry everything with their bakfiets.

People with similar interests or hobbys want to meet each other and share. Smart services give information such as social characteristics, places and demographic data and help people to connect via different platforms. It give the users a feeling of unity and they can save a lot of time and effort to “search” people with same interests in real.

    Social seating at KLM

Within a short time, you can find out who is going to sit next to you in your next KLM flight. You can log in with Facebook or LinkedIn and share your profile with the other passengers. This will give you the opportunity to establish a business contact with the person next to you, as example.

   Modamily: co-parenting

Based on the fact that people between 20 and 30 have to focus on their carrier and haven’t time to raise a family, this network give you the opportunity to find a co-parent before it’s “too late”. This network wants to help you, to take away the pressure of 40-year-olds finding a partner.

It’s a weird concept but maybe parents who choose to be a parent via this website are in some cases better parents. These co-parents will be behind and there is no relation ship or marriage which will destroy it... probably!

  Next door: network for neighboors

  Registrate, proof where you ‘re living and join a network with your neighboors. Especially in times, when people move more than often, a network to establish contact with your new neighboors is a good idea. 

In the next years an increasing number of Britons will make an extensive use of online retailers rather than real-world’s. For example Amazon provides almost everything on his website and is a fierce competitor for “normal” retailers.

Since 2011, Amazon has a new price check app. With this app, consumers can scan the bar code and compare it directly with the price in Amazon.

It is getting more and more important to protect the earth and use critical resources in a responsible manner. 

In the next years gas companies will provide British households with 53 million smart meters. I think it's really cool that consumers will get real-time information about their energy usage and can see how much money they spend before.

Start is 2014, so that in 2020 every British household can save presumable 23 £ every year.

With Google Earth you can “go” to your holiday destination before you even arrived. You can look for buildings, beaches, shops and your accommodation.

3D Travel, Inc. offers an online travel planning experience so that you can explore, discover and book your travels within virtual 3D city environments. At the moment, you can explore big destinations like Hawaii, San Francisco and Las Vegas in 3D.

The famous Starbucks has a new concept store in Amsterdam: 'Starbucks The Bank'. Starbucks has recently opened more concept stores in different cities around the world. You can find the concept store at Rembrandtplein. The store is with 430 square meters the biggest Starbucks of this continent.

Liz Muller is the architect of this special concept store of Starbucks. More than 35 people made this place how it looks now, with Liz in charge of the project. She also designed the first three Starbucks concept stores in Seattle, where it al began for Starbucks Coffee.

The Starbucks concept store is meant to let the consumer taste and test all kinds of special and exclusive kinds of coffee. The most exotic, rare and delicious coffee beans will be used.

Subculture

As in every city, certain areas are home to certain types of people. I've always been fascinated by the way people try to differentiate themselves from specific lifestyles and also enclose themselves to a certain subculture or group by talking/acting the same way, buying the same things and going to the same places as the group that they feel related to.

Amsterdam, being the multicultural city that it is, is home to a lot of different of subcultures. I personally hate the narrow-minded thinking in which all people are divided into these kinds of groups. However, there are a lot of similarities visible between certain groups of people.

One of the first 'differences' between people in society, that goes back to the first civilizations, is the way 'the rich' want to differentiate themselves from 'the poor'. In Amsterdam you can also find this gap.

Considered home to wealthier people of Amsterdam, Amsterdam Oud-Zuid is home to many of the places this particular ‘subculture’ tends to visit. To sketch a stereotype image, one from this subculture drives a Vespa, owns a blackberry, shops at the ‘PC Hooftstraat’, lunches at ‘Hergo’ and drinks coffee at Starbucks or the coffee company. 

Have you ever seen a combination of art, traffic and the streets? Maybe you have but not as funny as this kind of street art.

In the in the city of Amsterdam it is most of the time crowded. It is a metropolitan with great architecture and big buildings. This means it does not have enough space to create nature except the Vondelpark. There is only enough space for green and nature on the outside of the city. I assume that tourists do not go further than the core of the city.

This also applies to the fashion industry. The attention in recent years is focused on quantity and low cost of clothing. This over-consumption and a sharp fall as a result: clothing is abundant and is becoming shorter life cycle. This process leads to depletion of human and environment. Slow fashion, devised by academics Kate Fletcher, would have the opposite effect.Slow fashion stands for thoughtful design, produce and consume fashion. Slow fashionfits into the flow of renewed attention to lasting quality.

A city has advantages by adding this concept.

Techno

One of the most rapidly growing scenes the last few decades in Amsterdam is the techno scene. With the liberal mindset of the Amsterdam culture and the liberal mindset concerning drugs, techno music has had a free way into developing its very own subculture. Nowadays, organizing a technoparty has become more regular than throwing a birthday party.

Techno music started off as an underground industrial scene. In Amsterdam a lot of organizations thrive to hold on to the underground scene by selecting raw, underground locations. There are a lot of underground events, party’s that are illegal or semi-legal. Most legal events still try to give the vibe of an illegal setting.

One of the prime examples of a location holding on to the underground atmosphere that techno started off with, is called ‘Pand 14’. Located in the south-east district of Amsterdam, hosted in a former Chinese restaurant, Pand 14 is the perfect location for what most techno organizations are looking for in the vibe they try to deliver to their target group.

Pand 14 exists out of two floors, with the top floor spinning around at a slow pace. In the last couple of months there been an increasing amount of events given at this specific location.

Cup cakes everywhere. The cup cake seems to be a trend in Holland. In every supermarket you can find the right ingredients and stuff for cup cakes.

If you don't like cooking you can also let someone else make cup cakes for you. In Amsterdam you can buy cup cakes at ' Osdorper Cup a La Cake'. They make a lot of different cup cakes for the costumers. The cute cup cakes are made in every colour with fun decoration. A 'Chanel' cup cake, a flower on a cup cake, cup cakes for a wedding, cup cakes for a baby shower, you can find all this at Cup a La Cake. The bakery also makes lolly's in all kinds of colours.

There is a pop-up store in the famous Kalverstraat in Amsterdam. In this pop-up store you can find a different brand every two weeks. The brand that is located in the store will present a new product and wants to give the consumer an experience. The store is all about a new product. The consumer can get all the information about the product, see it, experience it and of course buy it.

Roosvicee, Steve Madden, Levi's, Dr Oetker, Volkswagen and Heineken are just a few brands who already had their pop-up store in the Kalverstraat.

What do you do when you go travel somewhere as a tourist? Usually tourists visit the main sight-seeings the museums and other important places that the particular place has.

When thinking about Amsterdam the, one thing from many others, that comes to your mind is the art history. In the center of Amsterdam there is a museum square, Museumplein. If you are art fan and enjoy art history the Van Gogh Museum and Rijksmuseum are a must go in Amsterdam.

A famous Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh is well known all over the world. It would be a shame to miss his museum. In the Van Gogh Museum you can view Van Gogh's life through art, from the Potato Eaters up through the last two months of his life in France.

Amsterdam wants to change its whole traffic system: subsidy for electric cars, free electricity and priority in traffic for bicycles.

The goal: Improve the air quality of Amsterdam by reducing the CO2 emission in 2025 by 40% compared to the 1990 level.

The way: Advertise it as eco-friendly place for tourists as one of the first smart cities in Europe.

First step: 10000 electric cars till 2015. The city of Amsterdam will contribute 50% of the extra charge for an electric car in comparison to a gasoline one.

According to Christine van 'T Hull, who works at the city administration, Amsterdam counts to the most expensive cities for parking with five Euros per hour. Parking with an electric car will be for free. At the moment, the recharge on one of the 100 charging stations is for free as well. On Google maps you can see which charging station is available.

The car traffic in the whole city and the parking spaces should be reduced. Park-and-ride should get cheaper and there will be new bike paths, 400 km in total.

The speed in the centre should be reduced to 30 to make the cycling more attractive.

Especially for our English target group, which we want to attract in 5 to ten years, this could be very interesting. Amsterdam as a smart city will be in an advanced stage then, the economy will be improved and this could be a new strategy to advertise the city.

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Source:

Financial Times Germany