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May 2, 2011 By Andy Opsahl
Joachim Pfeiffer
APP: TransiCast
CONTEST: DataSF.org 2009
STATUS: Active
Joachim Pfeiffer still updates TransiCast, a mobile app he launched in 2009 to help users navigate public transit systems, with data posted on San
Francisco’s DataSF.org and other open data repositories around the country. Pfeiffer said he hasn’t been able to monetize the app because few local governments post transit data online and in a usable format to take the app nationwide. Pfeiffer continues updating TransiCast, however, because it benefits his job with consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, where he serves public transit agency clients.
“I use it as leverage in proposals to transit agencies that commission the development of mobile apps,” Pfeiffer said, explaining that TransiCast serves as an example of what’s possible for agencies.
Eric Gundersen
APP: Stumble Safely
CONTEST: Apps for Democracy 2008
STATUS: Discontinued
In 2008, Eric Gundersen and four colleagues placed high in Washington, D.C.’s Apps for Democracy contest with Stumble Safely, an app that used crime reports and bar locations to give pedestrians safe routes for bar hopping. At the time, Gundersen was running Development Seed, an open source software development firm targeted toward international development. It helped that Gundersen’s team was able to use aspects of a tool Development Seed was already developing for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
“We were able to leverage some of the same tools that we were simultaneously using for USAID to track bird flu, and we made a bar map with it. It showed how versatile some of these tools could be,” Gundersen said.
He took down the app shortly after the contest, but didn’t stop using open data. Development Seed helps government agencies refine and use their open and closed data to create maps for tracking elections and other humanitarian-motivated factors.
The firm is developing a map for the Department of Education that shows where schools reside in proximity to certain broadband speeds. The firm hosts numerous data sets taken from government open data programs, which programmers can use for free in their own Web projects. Development Seed recently announced a custom map-making Web tool called TileMill, which Gundersen hopes will be an open source alternative to ESRI’s Arc Server.
You may use or reference this story with attribution and a link to
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Being in an organization that manages credit card reading parking meters, the ParkIt DC folks are disconneting reality from thier vision. What the app developers failed to consider is that unless the municipality is willing to spend huge dollars to put sensors in the streets under each and every parking spot, then the live feeds from the meters regarding the status of paid spaces is meaningless to their application. Many people pay for more time than they really use because it is much cheaper to pay for an extra half hour than to pay for the ticket when you arrived back 5 minutes too late. An app that relies on the payment information will inevitably send folks diving past open spaces to find an "unpaid" yet occupied space(because the vehicle has a ticket), which is not the same as an "unpaid AND unoccupied" space. It only has to happen once before I am not paying for that app! From the parking enforcement side, the tickets are not yet written by the system because without the sensors, an unpaid space is not an idication that a violation should be written. It still takes a person to see a vehicle in a space that is not paid for a ticket to be issued. I agreed it is coming, but understand why it cannot be an "insanely useful" app today. Next time we dig up the street, if we have extra money lying around, then we might consider adding the sensors, but when parking is only a dollar or so an hour, why bother??? Where is the ROI???