Archive for June, 2010

Our case study about our migration to the Azure Cloud platform is now live at Microsoft.com. Since the case study was published we have published our new site CitySourced, and it’s working great. The added computing power of Windows Azure and the storage of all the image data will help us nimbly scale up to meet the demands of the new site. Behind the scenes we setup a massive number of web crawls to index local governments and we needed some serious horsepower to do this work. Our Chief Architect, Jason Kiesel says, “Without Windows Azure, the database team would have to assemble a massive cluster of computers to run the web crawls. It would be impossible for a small startup to get this kind of computing power and storage. Even with the resources to acquire the number of computers to run the crawls, they would find there would be large amounts of downtime as they ran queries and then waited to refine queries or for new tasks to queue up.”

Read more on Microsoft.com

LOS ANGELES (June 21) — You might not be able to fight city hall, but now you can at least complain a little more efficiently.

A new app for iPhones, Droids and other new-generation mobile devices allows residents to send real-time complaints to city officials about problems they encounter in their neighborhoods. Supporters say the app, called CitySourced, can improve city responses, broaden the pool of people monitoring everything from potholes to public safety threats and help improve residents’ sense of community.

CitySourced draws on GPS and other mobile technologies to let users snap photographs and file complaints from their phones. It also creates databases of the complaints for municipalities, and can be customized to work with existing systems for dispatching repair crews. You can download the app for free.

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The iPhone app — a pilot program available to constituents in City Councilman Eric Garcetti’s 13th District — may represent the future of how city residents interact with government.
All a user has to do is take a picture of a trouble spot — a pothole, a broken sidewalk, an overgrown tree — and answer a few questions. Then the data and the location’s GPS coordinates are transmitted instantly to the city.

“It’s like having a city official in your pocket,” said Chuldenko, who recently used the app to report graffiti he spotted while strolling through his Atwater Village neighborhood. He was floored when the graffiti was gone a week later.
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