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The technological revolution that has taken place in recent decades, driven by advances and developments in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) has revolutionized the way people communicate, work, travel, live, etc. Cities need to evolve towards intelligent dynamic infrastructures that serve citizens fulfilling the criteria of energy efficiency and sustainability. This article provides an overview of the main smart city applications, and their implementation status in major cities around the world. We also present a study of patents on basic smart city technologies in order to show which countries and companies are making greater efforts to register the intellectual property. The relation between patented technologies and current ongoing smart city applications is also investigated.