Use Case: Making Urban Planning Faster, Cheaper and more Efficient
Written by Ari Hershberg on DataBC’s Blog
Use Case: Making Urban Planning Faster, Cheaper and more Efficient
One of this year’s Vancouver Open Data Day sponsors was UrbanLogiq. This young startup team uses open data to unlock the value of city planning to make urban planning faster, cheaper and more efficient. The CEO and co-founder gave one of the opening presentations at this year’s event, sharing their journey from 2016 to present.
This story is a high level recap of UrbanLogiq’s trajectory, from hackathon participant to full-fledged company.
Every year the Vancouver Open Data Day event is streamed live on Periscope. In 2016 a team of four developers worked on their concept to use open data to map factors relating to property development and land-use planning for government throughout the day and presented at the end of the event. Soon after the event, a viewer from the U.S. who watched the live stream connected with one of the team members, the now CEO and co-founder of UrbanLogiq Mark Masongsong. The viewer believed the team’s idea was a great start, so the team began work to take their concept to the next level. Their experiences and growth over the next two years was staggering.
Starting in 2016, these developers were invited to present at the successful Startup in Residence Program (STIR) in San Francisco. The STIR program was created to build partnerships between government and tech entrepreneurs collaborating on critical challenges. The team was then invited to the White House to present. They were then invited to speak at the World Bank, Harvard and then were interviewed and later accepted into the prestigious 500 Startups an early-stage venture fund and seed accelerator where the company participated in a four-month master class in the many elements of building a viable, strong company. UrbanLogiq also received early stage venture funding from 500 Startups.
“The application developed by UrbanLogiq helped us immensely in our day to day work here at the City of Surrey. It will allow us to replace our very tedious and expensive data collection program by leveraging our existing infrastructure to provide real time traffic volumes without the need for any additional hardware in the field”
– Taylor Spraggs, Traffic Engineer
“UrbanLogiq recently completed a proof of concept for the Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure, in partnership with the BC Innovation Council, and presented the results at the #BCTECH Summit. The proof of concept used existing ministry data to demonstrate how UrbanLogiq’s technology could assist in long-term planning, as well as showcasing the potential value of leveraging third-party data sets.”
-Shannon Karner, Project Manager, Business Transformation Services
UrbanLogiq has been working with public and private sector clients all over the world and now has a team of ten employees, with an office in Vancouver. The company opened up its first American office in New York City earlier this year.
The B.C. government recently modeled the STIR program in 2017.
Read full blog post on DataBC’s Blog
