“Complaining about a problem without proposing a solution is called whining” – Teddy Roosevelt

Despite coronavirus and its various impacts, Urban SDK continues to make great strides. We are heads down and intensely focused on building the company and providing tools our customers need. 

As we are all learning, our cities and states are facing a tremendous urgency to integrate the full power of our government into a force that can defeat this virus and restart our economy. At our core, this is why we started Urban SDK - to help public leaders leverage the full weight of our government, community and emerging technologies. 

Our platform provides a collaborative framework for government institutions to share data, automate workflows and dive deeper into analysis in order to give our customers the speed, agility and intelligence to make real-time, urgent decisions.

Highlights for the Week

• JEA: We secured a purchase order for a new customer. JEA is a community owned electric, water and sewer utility. This is our first customer in the energy industry and we will begin working with them to address internal, remote productivity use cases and enhance our platform’s ability to deliver mobile workflow tools. 
• Traffic SDK: We are excited to finalize the first release of our Traffic SDK, which automates corridor analysis on any highway, state or local road. This tool gives the Florida Department of Transportation instant access to configure analytics measuring roadway speeds, congestion and crashes on specific roadways. 
• CityLab: CityLab and 5T will adopt Traffic SDK to integrate their existing traffic flow data with our performance measures and broader datasets. 5T, Torino's public transit organization, has asked us to pilot two specific use cases in parking and traffic. Our platform is able to index open data sets provided by 5T and produce predictive analysis and data visualization to help assess congestion, emissions, and parking demand. We will provide 5T access to our platform in the coming days and will work with them to integrate additional datasets from partners like CityLab, GTT, [TO]Bike and the City of Turin. 
• Parking SDK: Our work with CityLab will additionally result in a new product feature focused specifically on analyzing parking demand and suggesting parking strategies for users based on an index of available supply, pricing, points of interest, mobility options, housing and real estate zoning. Parking management is a significant global market and a prime revenue source for many cities. We are excited to have our team of mad scientists go to work building a data-driven solution to improve how cities monetize and automate parking analysis.

COVID-19: If you have any ideas on how we can utilize our open data framework and machine learning to stop the spread of COVID-19, please email us: [email protected] 

• Our team will be working for the next several weekends on ways to apply data science to help stop the spread of COVID-19 and create better public guidance from open source COVID data. If any mentors are also working on this and would like to collaborate please let us know.

This week, we want to send a special ‘thank you’ to our customers:

As a young company we couldn’t have hoped for better customers. Your confidence and enthusiasm in what we are building is an inspiration to our team. From our city and mobility planners to our transportation operators and our highway patrol officers, we couldn’t do this without. Thank you for believing in us!

As we are experiencing, traditional government moves slow and often operates within silos. If we are to adequately prepare for the challenges that lie ahead, we must rethink our policies and operations to accommodate a whole-of-government, evidence based approach. 

We believe in digitizing citizen services, adopting data-driven principles and automating necessary but manual functions in order to prepare our cities for the challenges and opportunities ahead. Our team remains ready, focused and inspired by our mission - help government leaders build safer, integrated cities of the future.

Co-founders,

Drew + Justin

About Us

Urban SDK, a Techstars company, provides mobility intelligence for smarter cities. Urban SDK connects public agencies, policy makers, and the community with better data to make more informed policy and budgeting decisions. We enable customers to quickly gather, analyze, and visualize performance indicators to make decisions with a higher degree of confidence.