Ever seen a nasty pot hole or a wall full of graffiti and wished you could report the problem on the go instead of writing a letter or email to your city bureaucracy? TechCrunch 50 startup CitySourced is launching an a slew of smartphone applications that let you file an issue to your city from your phone, aiming to crowdsource this information for cities.
It’s pretty simple. The app on your Blackberry, Android or iPhone lets you take a picture of the infraction. The app detects your location via GPS and once the image is loaded and approved, you are brought to the reporting screen. You can then identify what the problem is, add comments, and Tweet the problem out from your Twitter account.
Once you press “file”, the report is captured, bundled and automatically transferred to the government agency that is responsible for the infraction. On the back end, the city agency gets a web dashboard that lets them see how many reports have been submitted, a map mashup of where the reports are located, pending reports that are incomplete, and graphs that break down reports by type over a given period of time. Cities can then download all the data into a file. The app is free for the user and cities pay an annual license fee for the dashboard.
CitySourced has just inked a deal with the city of San Jose, Calif. San Francisco recently implemented a similar plan to crowdsource city complaints via Twitter, but the ability to use a location-based app via CitySourced is compelling both for users and city governments.
CitySourced has just received an investment from Palm and will be launching on the Palm Pre soon.
Expert Panel Q&A (paraphrased)
The experts: Satish Dharmaraj, Lior Zorea, Bradley Horowitz, Tim O’Reilly, Kevin Rose
KR: I’d like a stream for my neighborhood of things that need to take action on.
BH: Will other data sources be added in? Will cities be able to import police reports?
A: Yes, we’d like to aggregate other info like census data, reports elected officials etc.
TO: I’m a huge fan pf this application. What’s your thinking about how to become a market leader. There are other similar apps out there-what’s your competitive advantage?
A: we’re looking to sign up a few more customers soon. Open311 is great but if a city adopts that platform, they are locking themselves into that city. Our platform is nationwide.
LZ: I love the idea. The market is huge. I’m concerned about the execution challenges.
Councilman from San Jose: Getting the info in a timely manner is important, the ability to get the image is important with CitySourced. This app will be instrumental to collect images and data in real-time.
Images:
Video:
Outside Coverage:
TC50: CitySourced lets citizens report potholes, graffiti to local government VentureBeat.
TC50: CitySourced Lets You Report Pot Holes And Graffiti On The Go Facternet.
City Sourced Allows Mobile Complaint Reporting IntoMobile.
I’d Call CitySourced, but I’m Just a Pothole bub.blicio.us.
City Sourced – A New Way To Inform City Hall #tc50 techgeist.
Citizen complaint app finally fires up TechCrunch50 CNET.
CitySourced Launches At TechCrunch50 YouVox Tech.
IPhones Take on Potholes With City Reporting Tool PCWorld.
IPhones Take on Potholes with City Reporting Tool CIO.
Deadpool.
The potholes are easy to spot. They are always about 30 feet away from the injured motorcycle rider.
Thanks Arnold, our Austrian governor.
The open source version of this is here:
http://www.apps...book-app-combo/
What is Microsoft Citizenship Platform then?
Ok, that’d be the light-side of its force, however it also smells police-state compilant.
It’ll be a success.
Just watched the presentation on the Live Stream…
WHERE do I get the APP! It’s AWSOME!
CitySourced Sales Guy : It will be 100.000 USD per year
City man : No, we only pay 100
CitySourced : Oh, never mind , I go to your competitor and sell it to him
City man : Good luck, I don’t have one.
Citysourced : Oh fuck, Ok, then , 100 USD
City man : For five years.
This is so 2014.
Does anybody think I would stop on 101 and make a picture of a whole in the street? Most times u discover a pot hole is while driving and nobody would stop to picture this. Furthermore, it is not so much about sending the data to the cities, but the cities just don’t have the resources and money to fix all this!
http://www.seeclickfix.com has been around for quite some time.
Sounds a lot like seeclickfix.com
this form of location based reporting will be applied to everything we can possibly imagine. i like trapster better.
Why is this company in TC50? Part of the requirements for TC50 is that they HAVE NOT LAUNCHED. Isn’t it unfair to the other companies to include companies that are already out testing the market place?
Isn’t the same the case for Yext from yesterday?
There are no requirements. They do whatever they want.
Geico pot hole for the win:
http://www.yout...h?v=NjMUfIKktWU
“Oh no…let me get my cellular out…oh shoot!…I got no phone…cuz I’m a pot hole…”
I didn’t get the business model here. How are they going to make money, can any1 please explain me?
City hall has to pay to get access to the dashboard?
So then all these tweets and pix would then become public records, once they were sent to the agency, correct?
http://www.fixmystreet.com/ has been doing this in the UK for a while now, and is available as an iphone and android app.
I checked out their admin demo.
The location using longitude-latitude isn’t a help really. How the hell is a normal human supposed to know what 34.00091-38.8892 (W) supposed to imply?
It would be fun to employ a service like this in India though..you’d have 10,000 complaints per minute in a city like New Delhi!
Someone should tag up his house.
i guess some idiot would have reported Banksy in his early days with this STASI app so we would have never knows of this exceptional tallent. no thanks i don’t want to live in a clean city that this app is going to promote.
thankfully in bangkok nobody gives a shit about graffiti or pot holes, people just chill and enjoy life.
File under: ignore with our city budget situation.
Come one..reporting pot holes? You can’t be serious. I thought TC50 was supposed to show off sexy startups. No one cares about freaking pot holes. People don’t and the government sure as heck doesn’t want to deal with them. Fail within 8 months. Fold in 12 months.
So umm what are these guys going to do when a bunch of enterprising teens start using this app to send pics of their junk to city hall? Don’t like the privacy implications with this at all.
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.
Congrats Kurty, Steep and Jason.. Love you guys
You guys deserve it
congrats to the people working on this project. if this doesn’t go, i’m sure they’ll go on to other great things.
about the app, if this can be on the same level that a phone call about a pot hole, i.e. liability, then it’s a go.
from my own experiences, the bigger issue in cities are that elected admins don’t even know the codes for a city. where i live, a resident buys a copy of the codes, like $80 annually, for two releases a year, and then makes a digital copy and a printed copy for the seven council members of the city. mind you that the council members are sworn to hold up the codes but don’t know them.
Graffiti, potholes thats life get over it. fail
OH and like if we had money.