Lots of people like to bike through Detroit, taking in everything from the city's historic neighborhoods to its vast expanses of urban prairie. Now a mobile app exists to aid cyclists discover new routes through the city.
That app came to fruition last weekend during Automation Alley's #hack4detroit hackathon at Grand Circus in downtown Detroit. A couple of tech engineers won $5,000 for creating Ride4Detroit, a mobile app that helps people discover, create, and share bike routes in the city.
Hackathons are usually 1-to-2-day events where techies gather to create new technology from scratch. The #hack4detroit hackathon challenged participants to build a mobile application using the city of Detroit’s new Open Data Portal.
"It was a fun and intense 24 hours that really got our brains working to come up with a solution that would help the city of Detroit," says Abdul Miah, co-founder and principal engineer at
rankedHiRe.
Miah and Imran Raja, senior software engineers at
MB Financial, created the app that integrates information on existing bike paths in Detroit.
Second place winners included
PishPosh.TV founders Ben Duell Fraser and Michael Evans, who is also a senior developer at
Loveland Technologies. The third place winner was Jonathan Werber, a developer at
Nexient.
Source: Automation Alley
Writer: Jon Zemke
Read more about Metro Detroit's growing entrepreneurial ecosystem at SEMichiganStartup.com.
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