Per Michael Arrington’s request I ran backstage and shoved a camera in CitySourced’s founders’ faces just after they completed what was one of the more compelling presentations of the day.
Question one: Palm is really paying companies to write apps for the Pre? Yes. How much? All I got despite truly obnoxious questioning was “under $500,000.” (If you’re a developer and you have a better answer, leave it in the comments or send to tips@techcrunch.com.)
We also talked about the biggest execution risk: Whether or not cities will actually use this data to make citizen’s lives better? Gavin Newsom: I hope you’re paying attention to this.
Video is on the jump. (Sorry for the jumpy camera work. It’s still early here.)
Such jumpy camera work! Obviously Techcrunch can not afford a tripod!
Theres a non-profit in San Francisco called ParkScan (http://parkscan.org) who have been doing this with parks for years. I wrote the original version of their web application and was involved with trying to get them integrated with city maintenance systems.
I think this is a great idea, obviously, but in my experience it’s just not that easy to get integrated into city governments, who tend to be slow to change and very commited to the status quo. The technology may be great, and you may be able to let people make reports whereever they see a problem, but making a report and getting something fixed are two very different issues. I’d be very interested to see if they can not only get city govenments to agree to use their service, but also if they can actually get them to follow up on reports. If people are reporting but nothing is getting fixed then they will simply stop reporting.
Reporting grafitti and potholes that my city won’t fix… Free.
Telling the world Palm is paying you to develop on their platform… Priceless.
cool product comming out of Los Angeles. mylocator will offer the same features for over 1000 location based tagging channels. examples: CityLocator, CountyLocator, StateLocator. in the end our massive strategic natural language location based network will be virtually impossible to compete with.
Hasn’t this been done for quite some time already by someone else? started in the UK few years ago and in the US it’s done be these guys…
http://seeclick...x.blogspot.com/
http://seeclickfix.com/
Integrated into lots of newspapers. Since I’m not at TechCrunch50, what’s so special about citysourced?
The effort to create an open standard around 311 services like this: http://www.open311.org
There are a lot of wheels being reinvented at the moment, so there’s a valuable opportunity to pool the innovation into an open interoperable protocol. Remember that open source software and especially open standards provide opportunities for private enterprise and software as a service. However, an open standard can also withstand the fragility of start-ups and the marketplace.
Considering these are services paid for with our scarce tax dollars, this is not something we should take a risk on by depending on a proprietary system.
Forget the jumpy camera work, how about an apology for your sketchy journalism. You say “I” more often than a drunken pirate.
i looove this concept.