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This is Heidi Miller from the Knight News Challenge, spreading the word about open source development and communication innovation. And we're talking with past KNC winners to explore how they succeeded in getting funding for their great ideas. Today's new idea is from Adrian Holovaty, founder of Everyblock.
What’s your great idea?
Hi, my name is Adrian Holovaty, and my idea is called Everyblock, that is a website that lets you find news and information within a tight radius around your block in a number of American cities. And it works by, it’s very simple, you just go to the site, you enter your address or your neighborhood name in the nine cities that we’re currently in. And you get a page with a bunch of information about what’s happened near you recently, that could be crimes that have been reported; it could be your local restaurant got inspected and that sort of public record stuff. It’s also any mainstream media or blog coverage that has been written about stuff in your neighborhood, also like webby things like Flickr photos that have been taken and geotagged near you and reviews of local restaurants near you that have been posted recently on Yelp and things like that. So we’re taking all that geographically relevant information and putting it in one place so that you can get alerted whenever stuff that happens near you happens.
How did you come up with the idea?
The motivation for Everyblock came out of a similar project that I started in 2005. That was one of the original Google Maps mashups called ChicagoCrime.org that took every reported crime according to the Chicago Police Department and mapped that out on Google Maps and made it browsable every which way. And one of the cool things about that site that I always liked was that every block in the city of Chicago had its own web page where you could type in your address and see which crimes had been reported right on that individual block. And you could get an RSS feed for your block and just bookmark that page and check it and see what was happened around you. I really liked that idea; I thought it was really powerful. And from day one of ChicagoCrime, I wanted to see whether any other information could be added to that. However, as ChicagoCrime was just this side project; I never made any money off of it; it was just something I did for fun as a public service, I never got the chance to add other additional information until I found out about the Knight News Challenge. And I figured hey, maybe this is the opportunity that will let me get some funding so I can devote my full-time energies into making such a site.
Where is Everyblock.com now?
So here’s where we are now. It’s now September 2008; we launched in January, and we originally launched with three cities: Chicago, New York City, San Francisco. We then added two more; we added three more a couple months after that, and then just a week later, we added Los Angeles, so we’re getting really, really good at adding new cities and also adding new types of information to the site. We try to add at least one type of information to at least one of our cities every week, so it’s a really, really tight schedule, and we’re really quick at developing new data sets and also adding new features.
What advice would you give to someone with a great idea?
So my advice to anyone who is interested in submitting an idea to this contest is not only to obviously show that your idea is sound and will help the world and will improve communities and all that good stuff but also prove that you’re the right person that can do it, prove that you’re the right person who can write the code or design the pages or maybe you know a lot of people who can help you out with it. So it’s one thing to have an idea; it’s another to actually have the means of making it happen.
Adrian won funding for his great idea, Everyblock, through last year's Knight News Challenge. The Knight News Challenge is a not-for-profit contest run by the Knight Foundation that gives away $5 million a year to fund open source development and innovation. For more information on dates and times for local meetups happening across the country in October or to apply before November 1st, visit www.newschallenge.org
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