PIttsburgh has really had a great year what with their Super Bowl and Stanley Cup victories, but now they can add a very cool tech innovation to their list of things that make it awesome to live there.
Engineers from Carnegie Mellon developed YinzCam, a mobile phone application company who've pioneered some really cool tools to enhance Penguins games for spectators. But their most recent creation launched on Monday, and is designed to benefit the entire city free of charge, simply because they "love Pittsburgh."
Dubbed "iBurgh," the app allows Pittsburgh-ers [?] to literally take civic improvement into their own hands. See something that needs attention? Like a pothole, graffiti, maybe a homeless guy eating a dead cat? Take a photo, the site is geotagged, and city officials can easily find the location and take care of the problem without your having to direct them because the system is tied into the cities "311" non-emergency complaint number.
We all know plenty of people with the iPhone, and for those of us who don't, YinzCam claims they're working on a program for all cell phone types.
Buffalo and pretty much any other city could benefit greatly from this genius design. It would be very nice to have direct access to the city when something needed a fix. My only question is how quickly is the reaction time to these geotagged pictures? I guess we have to watch Pittsburgh to find out.
(Top image, thanks to Kevin Heffernan for picture of Buffalo). And thanks to Stip for the tip.
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Engineers from Carnegie Mellon developed YinzCam, a mobile phone application company who've pioneered some really cool tools to enhance Penguins games for spectators. But their most recent creation launched on Monday, and is designed to benefit the entire city free of charge, simply because they "love Pittsburgh."
Dubbed "iBurgh," the app allows Pittsburgh-ers [?] to literally take civic improvement into their own hands. See something that needs attention? Like a pothole, graffiti, maybe a homeless guy eating a dead cat? Take a photo, the site is geotagged, and city officials can easily find the location and take care of the problem without your having to direct them because the system is tied into the cities "311" non-emergency complaint number.
We all know plenty of people with the iPhone, and for those of us who don't, YinzCam claims they're working on a program for all cell phone types.
Buffalo and pretty much any other city could benefit greatly from this genius design. It would be very nice to have direct access to the city when something needed a fix. My only question is how quickly is the reaction time to these geotagged pictures? I guess we have to watch Pittsburgh to find out.
(Top image, thanks to Kevin Heffernan for picture of Buffalo). And thanks to Stip for the tip.
Boston is doing this too, their officials said the response is much quicker than the conventional phone call method.