Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 798

A few weeks ago, I tweeted that I was creating a simple email newsletter that would notify you of new planning/development applications (and updates) near where you live (in Toronto). About 100 people subscribed following that tweet and we then spent the following few weeks getting the service ready.

The first email was sent out today and, if you haven’t already, you can subscribe for free, here . The way it works is pretty simple. You enter your postal code. We draw a 1000m radius around that postal code (we’ll monitor this number going forward to see if it continues to make sense). And we then send you any new applications/updates that fall within that radius.

So depending on where you live, the first email you receive could contain a long list of projects. They’re all assumed to be new initially. But going forward, the list will become much shorter and you’ll only receive an email if/when there’s something new to report.

The ultimate goal is to come up with a better way to engage people around new development projects. This is a first step. Regardless, our guts tell us that many people would appreciate a quick way to see what is happening around them. If you have any initial thoughts, please leave a comment below or send me an email.

You can email subscribe for free by visiting unlyst.com .

I have stayed at two hotels over the last month where I did not need to interact with a human as part of the check in process. And in one of those two instances I didn’t even need to interact with a computer at the hotel.

My room key was issued to me through an app and I used that (and Bluetooth) to open my hotel room door (after the app, of course, notified me that my room was ready).

This is prediction #2 in Fred Wilson’s annual roundup of what is going to happen next in the world. Automation is reducing the costs associated with operating many businesses. Who is going to be the beneficiary of this consumer surplus?

The other prediction that should interest most of you — because the impacts would be widespread — is this one here regarding climate change:

The looming climate crisis will be to this century what the two world wars were to the previous one. It will require countries and institutions to re-allocate capital from other endeavors to fight against a warming planet. This is the decade we will begin to see this re-allocation of capital. We will see carbon taxed like the vice that it is in most countries around the world this decade, including in the US. We will see real estate values collapse in some of the most affected regions and we will see real estate values increase in regions that benefit from the warming climate. We will see massive capital investments made in protecting critical regions and infrastructure. We will see nuclear power make a resurgence around the world, particularly smaller reactors that are easier to build and safer to operate. We will see installed solar power worldwide go from ~650GW currently to over 20,000GW by the end of this decade. All of these things and many more will cause the capital markets to focus on and fund the climate issue to the detriment of many other sectors.

For the rest of Fred’s predictions, click here . These are always great reads.

Happy New Year from Miami. (This post is bring written on my phone.)

A number of people have asked me if I will be making any resolutions this year. I’m not really a fan of making resolutions, per se. If you really want to do something — such as, oh I don’t know, go to the gym more often — I think you should just go and do it and not kid yourself that January 1 is the appropriate day in which to start.

That said, this time of year can be useful for annual planning. It’s easy to get preoccupied with executing throughout the year. Execution is everything. But it’s also valuable to use this “idle time” to think about your own personal and professional roadmap. What have I been doing? Where do I want to go? And should I make tweaks to the former to optimize for the latter?

I have been doing exactly that over this last week and I have made a number of changes to where I plan to invest my time, energy, and money in 2020. So I am excited for the year (and decade) ahead. Maybe some of you have been doing the same and feel similarly.

As always, thank you for reading over the last year. Next year will be year seven of this daily blog. It’s hard to imagine that it’s been that long already. I made a decision to start writing publicly and it clearly stuck. For what it’s worth, that decision didn’t happen on the first of January.

Welcome to 2020.