Archive for December, 2010
CitySourced Reporting Is Now Live!
Dec 28th
We at CitySourced are constant looking to improve our product offerings, and we’re happy to announce today that we’re going live with a new suite of reporting tools geared exclusively to our customers. We’ve been collecting data with our smartphone applications (available on iPhone, Android, Blackberry and Windows Phone 7) for over a year now, and it’s been starting to pile up. Now our customers can make use of this data and gain valuable insights into their workflow. With the new reporting application, our customers can now see:
- Total Reports by Date (Annual, Quarter, Month, Day)
- Total Reports by Report Type (Pothole, Graffiti, Street Light, etc.)
- Total Reports by Device Type (iPhone, Android, WP7, etc.)
- Total Reports by Device OS (iPhone 3.0, 3.1.2, Android 2.0, etc.)
- Total Reports by Status Type (Submitted, Received, Closed, etc.)
- Average Time to Close a Report
- Shortest Time to Close a Report
- Longest Time to Close a Report
All of these reports can also be broken down based on time period (ex: All reports from last 120 days, broken down by month or day). And, of course, all of the reports can be viewed on a map, giving a much needed geographical context.
We’ve implemented this solution on top of Azure in partnership with Microsoft. All of the reporting data will be stored in Azure Tables (for virtually infinite scalability) and the reports are batched processed by a Worker Role running in the Azure Cloud.
With the new Reporting application, our customers are now better equipped to analyze the data we’ve been collecting for them. Better analysis equals better decision making for both existing and future policy making. Better decision making will result in better quality of life for the residents of our customers. It’s a win-win for everyone involved. One can only imagine the possibilities: isolate gang movement and potential turf wars with graffiti analysis; locate infrastructure issues by seeing what streets are flooded most often; identify traffic and road usage by looking at potholes. The possibilities are truly endless!
If you’d like to see how these reports look and work, our sales team will be happy to drive you through an online demo. Feel free to contact them!
What Are the Must-Have iPhone Apps? Why?
Dec 22nd
- CitySourced, for telling the politicians about problems in my city.
- Twitter app. I use it all day long.
- TripIt. Keeps all my travel data and helps me get information from airlines and others.
- AroundMe. Helps me find businesses near me.
- iMovie. For editing videos.
- Instagram. For sharing photos.
- 360 Panoramic. For taking panoramic photos and sharing them.
Read more on quora.com
Top 12 Must-Have, Free Apps Mobile for That New iPhone
Dec 21st
Getting a new mobile and plan on doing lots of sharing in the New Year? The following are 12 of my favorite mobile enabled apps/services that I would suggest any iPhone user rush out and grab – note, many of these apps also support Android, BB, and other mobile platforms.
If I had to start loading my iPhone from scratch today these would be some of the first apps that I would load. Enjoy!
Read more on gisuser.com
Crowdsourcing City Issues – Now With a New Windows Phone App
Dec 20th
One of the great success stories of 2010 has been state and local governments embracing Gov 2.0 to more effectively engage their citizens. Facing limited resources and dwindling budgets, governments are doing more with less, and location-based services that use GIS (Geographic Information System) technology is one of the coolest examples of this trend. One Microsoft partner—CitySourced—is leading the way with innovative smart phone apps based on the Windows Azure platform.
CitySourced describes its app as a real-time mobile civic engagement platform. Users of smart phones like the new Windows Phone as well as iPhones and BlackBerries can use CitySourced to send requests and complaints about issues in their neighborhood directly to local officials. Using GPS and related mobile technologies, the app allows you to easily report public safety threats, quality of life issues, or environmental concerns using the camera on your own phone. And because the app uses geo-tagging – automatically adding geographic coordinates to the complaint – you don’t even need to know the address or specific location of the issue you are flagging for attention.
Read more on msdn.com
CitySourced Now Available on Windows Phone 7 (WP7)
Dec 16th
We finally got the word yesterday that our application, CitySourced, is now approved and available for download from the Windows Phone Marketplace. With all of our experience in mobile development, I must say (and of course I am biased), that developing for WP7 was an absolute dream. We’re a .NET shop so we’re very familiar with the Visual Studio IDE, the best IDE on the market currently hands down in my opinion. We could get into an argument over this – what about Eclipse or XCode or this or that? They all completely blow when compared to Visual Studio. Microsoft has really outdone themselves with VS2010. Anyway, I digress.
After downloading the required plugins for VS2010 to develop WP7 applications (I’ll make a separate blog post on my personal blog about that), we were off and running. We already had all the back end services created and working since we’re on the other platforms, so all we needed to worry about was the client end. WP7 applications are based on Silverlight and XAML, and while this is not my forte, I had taken a WPF & Silverlight bootcamp up at Microsoft in Redmond a few years ago.
All in all, it took us about 4 weeks to get our application wired up and working. Granted, there was no back end work to be done, but 4 weeks is pretty incredible (and I wasn’t working on it full time – probably 75% of my time). I brought in some outside help with James Richards, a really talented developer that has been working with us on many of the Esri components. We had about a week to clean up some final bugs, and we’ve finally passed the approval process. The approval process was great too. Our application just so happened to fail twice (I admit, I didn’t read the entire submission guide…), but the great thing about Microsoft’s approval process is that they give you a detailed report as to why the application failed and the steps to reproduce it! Having only dealt with Apple until now, all I have to say to that is “Wow”. Apple could definitely learn a thing or two from Microsoft when it comes to the app approval process.
So if you’re a mobile developer, and you’re wondering if you should take the dive into the world of WP7, our recommendation would be to go for it. From a developer standpoint, it was a great experience. And if you’re a .NET/C# developer, you’ll be cursing Apple and Objective-C and wondering why it wasn’t this easy to begin with. Microsoft definitely got a win on this one.