Posts tagged smartphone
Columbia County Government Unveils “Citizen Reporter”
Feb 21st
Columbia County, GA – The Columbia County Board of Commissioners is proud to announce the launching of a new smart phone application that will allow citizens to snap and submit photos, video and audio files of potholes, illegal dumping, deceased animals, and any other issues that Columbia County needs to address. During a press event on Tuesday, experts from the Columbia County Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Department will provide a live overview of how the system works and the EOC and 3-1-1 staff will conduct a live demonstration from the field to the 3-1-1 Center to show how fast and easy it is to report a problem.
“In government, you can’t wait for people to come to you – you need to give residents the tools to empower themselves in the most convenient way” said Commission Chairman Ron C. Cross. “This real time mobile application will allow our citizens to identify public safety and quality of life issues and report them to the county for quick resolution.”
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Longview, TX Launches CitySend Mobile 311 App
Feb 17th
Longview, TX residents now have a more high-tech way of reporting potholes, dead animals, sewer leaks or other problems to the local overnment. Residents with smartphones can get a new mobile app called “CitySend“ to inform public works officials of their public issues. The mobile app, unveiled by Longview GIS Manager Justin Cure, allows users to take photos, record video and audio of a problem, and automatically provide GPS coordinates. After the report is submitted, users can track all reported problems on a map as well.
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Mayor Carlisle Announces ‘Honolulu 311′ Smartphone Reporting System
Jan 31st
(Jan. 31, 2012)— City and County of Honolulu Mayor Peter Carlisle today announced the launch of “Honolulu 311,” a new system through which the public may use personal smart phones to report abandoned vehicles, broken street lights, illegal dumping and other issues. CitySourced developed and launched the mobile app for Honolulu.
Carlisle also announced that three fellows from the nonprofit Code for America organization have joined the City for five weeks to help us better connect with the public.
“The Honolulu 311 system will help Honolulu become a lean, clean, smart city through the use of technology,” Carlisle said. “This is one of the goals this administration had envisioned to make city government more user-friendly.”
Crowdsource Your Government
Jan 19th
By: Jason Kiesel
Governments are striving to accomplish more with fewer resources. Additionally, citizens are looking for governments to embrace the gov 2.0 movement, to become more transparent with allocated resources, and to increase communication and feedback. It is a lofty goal, but one that we feel that will increase the effectiveness of government, while also improving citizens’ experience. More >
Harford County, Maryland Launches App
Nov 23rd
Harford County residents now have a more high-tech way of reporting potholes, dead animals, flooding or other problems to the county government. Residents with smartphones can get a new mobile app called “Harford County Connect” to inform county officials of their public issues. The mobile app, unveiled by Harford County Executive David Craig, allows users to take photos, record video and audio of a problem, and automatically provide GPS coordinates. After the report is submitted, users can track all reported problems on a map as well.
Wired Highlights CitySourced Windows Phone 7 App
Nov 11th
Our friends at Wired were kind enough to highlight our involvement in Microsoft BizSpark and our Windows Phone 7 App.
“It’s never easy being a third-party app developer. Besides needing a great app idea, you must master your platform’s SDK, and then work hard to make sure your app has visibility in whatever platform ecosystem you’ve chosen to infiltrate. Enter Microsoft’s BizSpark program, which helps software devs bring their apps to market.
One of the program’s major initiatives is Mobile Acceleration Week, a multi-city road show that’s designed to give guidance and support to Windows Phone Mango developers. Last week, the event was held in San Francisco, so we dropped by to hunt for the latest, greatest Windows Phone apps coming down the pike. Here are 10 of the most promising. Just be aware that not all are currently available in Marketplace.”
CitySourced
A large number of apps for any platform will be frivolous, so it’s nice when a useful, productive tool comes along that helps you take an active role in bettering your community.
CitySourced is one such app. It’s a real-time civic-engagement platform that allows you to report on, and read reports relating to, issues like public safety, damage to public property, and environmental problems like illegal dumping. You can even take pictures of the offending issue to include in your report. The app delivers these reports to your local city hall so authorities can (theoretically) take quick action.
CitySourced lets you write a new report, check out your past reports, and view issues documented by others for your city, by list view or map view. You can also check out local news.
In addition to helping you serve your civic duty, this app could also come in handy if you’re looking to move to a low crime area, which could perhaps be indicated by fewer instances of graffiti and tagging. It might also be a good choice if you’re looking for a part of town to perform community service in.
5 Awesome New CitySourced Features
Nov 8th
Version 1.4 of our CitySourced app is now live for Android and iPhone! This is a major revision with tons of new features, many of which were in direct response to customer input. In addition to the many new features, the entire app received an upgrade under the hood, making CitySourced faster and more stable. Here are 5 top new features:
How Smartphones are Used {Infographic}
Oct 8th
Smartphones are everywhere. For many of us, the devices have become an extension of our being. We text, check movie times, and check-in our current location. It’s natural and comfortable for us to pull out our mobiles and send out tweet or status update. But have you ever stopped to considered which activities dominate on the smartphone? The team at Tatango created the following infographic with data compiled from the Pew Research Centers Internet & American Life Project
Steve Jobs’ Influence on CitySourced
Oct 6th
Most of you, and especially those in the tech world, have heard the news that we lost one of the great ones. The passing of Steve Jobs will bring many articles and stories about his legacy. Many will describe how his vision and the Apple technology drove our society into the greatest technology era ever. But, that’s not the focus of this post; instead, I’d like to discuss how Steve Jobs personally influenced us here at CitySourced. Our CEO, Jason Kiesel, said it best:
via @jasonkiesel
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.