Last week’s Bridge SF conference in San Francisco was all about startups. They covered community engagement, cybersecurity, transportation, artificial intelligence, human-centric design and more.
Government Technology already rounded up many of the Startup in Residence (STiR) companies that demonstrated their work through that program, but many more startups made an appearance. Here’s a look at some of those doing business with California cities.
Exygy
Exygy, a tech-focused public benefit corporation, has been working with San Francisco for a couple of years on a centralized portal for affordable housing listings, application and lottery selection.
SeamlessDocs
SeamlessDocs, already well-established, worked with the city of Walnut Creek through the STiR program to digitize its application process for residential parking permits. The project wound up expanding, however, and in the end the company also built internal and external dashboards for the city, police and public to better understand the residential parking permit system as a whole.
DroneIQ and Coppersmith Consulting
The city of Vallejo has some very old water pipes — Mayor Bob Sampayan told conference attendees he’s seen one pipe from the 1880s. And the city spends a lot of time and money inspecting those pipes every year. That process involves a lot of driving and walking.
So the city enlisted DroneIQ and Coppersmith Consulting to use drones for the process instead. Using drones mounted with cameras and other equipment, they were able to survey an area, process images and generate a high-resolution 3-D model with inspection indicators marked within a day.
Waycare
Waycare has been running a program to predict traffic accidents and congestion, but that’s not all the company is. It’s all about data-based traffic management. It demonstrated that broader angle through a partnership with Walnut Creek.
The company's work there was all about bringing together a lot of different data sources the city can access individually, but which all route to different areas — closed-circuit cameras, vehicle counts from inductive loop detectors, weather, telematics, smartphone navigation apps, events calendars and more.
Currently the company is onboarding the solution for police officers, who will be able to use it to see real-time traffic information as they patrol.
LocaleIQ
LocaleIQ worked with the city of Santa Monica to revamp its online system for information on parks. The resulting solution offers an interactive map where residents and visitors can find information about where parks are, what amenities they have, when they’re open and more. They set it up in such a way that employees who lack technical skills should be able to work with the map and add or edit information.
But the work went further. The partners built in space reservations for the parks, data analytics capabilities for the cities and different ways for citizens to search parks. For example, residents can filter parks to see which ones are dog-friendly and which have basketball or tennis courts.
RideAlong
RideAlong made its name in the public safety space, but through its work with San Francisco, the company is branching into public health.
The startup worked with a Department of Public Health team to deliver medical care to homeless people, a process that requires a lot of specialized knowledge. RideAlong worked to supplement the team with a mobile app that it could use to keep track of information it has struggled to hold onto.
For example, workers can use the app to enter information about people they’ve served, which builds a medical history that can be important for making decisions on the fly. It also helps streamline the process of logging the work the street team is doing, as well as improving the way the department can bill third parties — the state government, for example — for the services it’s delivering.
