CitySourced

Los Angeles – December 19, 2011 – CitySourced, a location based mobile reporting platform and the leader in mobile civic engagement, announced today that it has closed $1.33 million in a Series A round of financing. The capital will be used to continue product development as well as accelerate sales and marketing efforts.

Greg Baird was nice enough to reference CitySourced in this thought leadership piece focusing on U.S. Water Infrastructure.

One powerful trend is GIS combined with smart phones to offer public organisations a low cost, citizen driven “311″ system. For example, Los Angeles and San Francisco and others have embraced CitySourced, a real time mobile civic engagement platform. CitySourced allows citizens to identify civic issues like water main breaks and report them to city hall/utility for quick resolution with a tracking mechanism. Leveraging GIS, work order integrated breakthrough provides government with an opportunity to use technology to save time and money plus improve accountability to those they govern.

To read more Click Here

Our friends at Tech Cocktail wrote a new blog post about CitySourced.

Here’s an excerpt, ” The Los Angeles-based startup lets users submit video, audio, or photo evidence of local issues related to public safety or the environment: on the app, I saw reports on graffiti, a car that was broken into, and illegal left turns at an intersection.”

To read more…(Click Here)

Our partners at Esri invited us to join them in their booth at the National League of Cities Conference again this year.

We attended last year in Denver, and this year was a much different vibe. There was a palpable buzz from the attendees, many which were newly elected.

Also, lots of clients were in attendance, and we had fun being able to spend more time with them.

Kurt Daradics, Co-Founder at CitySourced with Client #1, Councilman Pete Constant with the City of San Jose.

Our friends at The Next Web were nice enough to feature us. Great story!

When you see something in your neighborhood that shouldn’t be there, you’re not always sure of who you should contact. Contacting the police for graffiti isn’t the best use of their time, so the company CitySourced has created an app to collect local problems and issues. There’s a web version, and it’s also available for the Android, iOS, Blackberry, and Windows platforms.

Even if you’re not reporting issues around you, CitySourced gives you a great idea of how safe a neighborhood is or isn’t. The reports are submitted directly to your local City Hall.

To read more…

Industry leader American City & County recently published a fantastic article highlighting CitySoruced and our work with Corpus Christi.
Excerpt from the article: While people still attend town hall and city council meetings to express their frustrations and concerns, many more people — by an order of magnitude — now interact with their local governments without ever stepping foot into municipal buildings. Instead, they use their smart devices to lodge a complaint or to alert public safety and public works about an incident or problem.
It is a phenomenon that is expected to grow, fueled in part by the continuing proliferation of smart phones. According to a study released in July by the Pew Research Center, 35 percent of American adults currently own smart phones; of those in the 25-34 age bracket, 58 percent own smart phones. There is little reason to believe that those numbers will not continue to grow in an aggressive fashion.
Social networking also is fueling the new era of citizen engagement, according to Michael Armstrong, CIO for Corpus Christi, Texas. “Almost all politicians now have Facebook pages, and they’re becoming very comfortable with connecting to people that way,” Armstrong says. “We also have a group of young people coming up who communicate entirely differently than the past several generations. They are connected all the time, and they are social. But they don’t connect face to face — or even voice to voice — anymore. Instead, they’re using the technologies that are available to them on their computers and, increasingly, on their phones.” To read more click here

Our partners at Esri invited us to join them in their booth at the ICMA conference again this year. We attended last year in San Jose, and this year was a much different vibe. There seemed to be an increased focus on civic engagement, plus a heightened sense of just how much things are changing in the world, and in our own domestic markets. We even met a delegation from the Chinese government about how they can use crowd sourced technology. They were interested in our Reno NV Bike & Ped Planning Project. Can you imagine?

One thing is for sure, we’re working closely with our friends at Esri to do our part to transform civic engagement. Our approach to this transformation is to work from the inside out and help our public sector cliental connect broken workflow and optimize input channels. Our “Channel Shift” strategy is all positive results, and that’s something we all like.

Chris Thomas, Director of Marketing, State & Local Government at Esri with Kurt Daradics, Co-Founder at CitySourced.

Join a conversation with Kurt Daradics, co-founder of CitySourced, on civic engagement mobile apps and innovation in cities. With Adriel Hampton, Allison Hornery and Steve Lunceford. Click Here

With L.A.’s tight budget and growing demand for quality-of- life fixes, self-service may be the best way to ensure residents get service. Read more Click Here…

At the beginning of 2011, the LAUSD launched a crowdsourcing program powered by CitySourced. Once fully implemented, it could cut the district’s maintenance request-processing expenses by 80 percent.

To read more