Government Technology already rounded up many of the Startup in Residence (STiR) companies who demonstrated their work through that program, but many more startups made an appearance. Here’s a look at nine more.
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, Calif., 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 citizens to better understand the residential parking permit system as a whole.DroneIQ and Coppersmith Consulting
The city of Vallejo, Calif., has some very, 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 partnered with DroneIQ and Coppersmith Consulting to use drones for the process instead. Using drones mounted with cameras and other equipment, the partners 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 in Las Vegas 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.
Biobot Analytics
Biobot Analytics has been making waves lately as it launches a product that was years in the making — sewage sampling, processing and analysis to gather fast, location-specific data on public health. The company is starting by monitoring opioid use, which it’s already doing with the cities of Cambridge, Mass., and Cary, N.C., but it’s looking for five more city partners to run pilot tests with this year.Parknav
There are several solutions already available to cities to monitor parking availability in parking lots and garages. But on-street parking is a tougher nut to crack.Parknav has developed a solution by pulling together data from a lot of different sources — mapping companies, telecommunication firms and power companies, to name a few — to get an idea of parking availability curbside. Critically, the company doesn’t try to tell drivers exactly where a space is available; rather, the idea is to get a relatively accurate idea of whether curb space is available on a certain block.
The company partnered with Miami-Dade County, Fla., to help drivers find street parking at one of its busiest transit stations, which has a parking lot that fills up early on most days.
LocaleIQ
LocaleIQ worked with the city of Santa Monica, Calif., 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, which have basketball or tennis courts, and so on.
RideAlong
RideAlong made its name in the public safety space, but through its partnership with San Francisco the company is branching into public health.The startup partnered with a Department of Public Health team tasked with delivering 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 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 is able to bill third parties — the state government, for example — for the services it’s delivering.
