Code for America, the non-profit organization that creates government-changing apps for communities around the U.S., has received applications from 19 U.S. city, state and federal agencies, including the U.S. Department of State.
Each of these government entities will compete to be one of the three to five communities that gets Code for America fellows to create a customized, open-source app to solve a pervasive problem in public service or government administration.
For example, in the last Code for America cycle, five cities were picked for projects such as an Open311-type project and an application that allows citizens to monitor and give feedback on city hall proposals.
The 19 applicants will compete for a spot in the next Code for America cycle. Applications will be judged based on the government’s commitment to the partnership, funding to support the project, and the openness, efficiency, and reusability of the proposed application or project. The selection process will be guided by a committee, which will announce the winning applicants in June 2011.
Once three to five candidates are selected, the custom apps will be developed by Code for America fellows, a team of 20 crack web and mobile developers hand-selected by an all-star committee that includes Irene Au of Google, Paul Buchheit of Facebook, Anil Dash of Expert Labs and many more.
Code for America’s Government Relations Director Alissa Black said in a release, “It’s great to see not only this much interest in Code for America, but also enthusiasm from public officials in using technology to change the way government works.
The response we’re seeing proves that government is thinking creatively about ways to innovate in response to our fiscal crises, and that the open government movement is really taking hold within government itself.”
We came across a nifty little tool this week that creates an infographic from your Foursquare data.
Built by Stormpixel Studios at a Foursquare Hack Day event in February, the tool creates a simple infographic that displays a world map; your checkin, network and tip counts; your badges; your checkins by category, such as travel, or arts and entertainment; the number of coffees you have consumed and more. (My coffee count says one. Somehow it must have known all those Starbucks checkins were for tea and bananas.)
This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.
Though the old adage that the customer is always right isn’t exactly true, listening to feedback from your customers is important for small business success. Feedback isn’t always easy to swallow, but it can be extremely valuable.
Your customers are the ones who regularly use your products or services; their input and suggestions can help you make more sound business decisions. Further, encouraging customer feedback can also lead to better business relationships and stronger customer retention.
Soliciting, accepting and organizing feedback can be a daunting task, however. Comment cards and suggestion boxes leave mountains of paper to sort through, while e-mail forms produce unorganized data that is hard to visualize and difficult to respond to in a formal manner.
The following tools are designed to help your business solicit feedback via the web and connect with your customers in more meaningful ways.
UserVoice creates a simple forum for your users to submit and vote on feedback. Your customers can access the forum via a widget embedded on your website or via a dedicated forum page. Customers submit ideas, issues or suggestions, and other users can vote these ideas up and down. This is helpful because it allows you to gauge which ideas your customers really want implemented and which problems are isolated issues versus widespread situations. UserVoice allows business owners to respond to issues and ideas.
Cost: The app offers plans from free to $289/month and up.
Get Satisfaction is a user support community, and unlike many of the apps and widgets on this list, customers are able to create a page for any company that isn’t already in the system. That means there’s a chance your company might already have a page.
For businesses, the app provides a forum-like help page for users to ask question, submit ideas, gets support and give props. Companies are able to designate multiple employees to provide official answers to customer questions. They also offer a Facebook app, so you can integrate support directly into your Facebook Fan Page.
Cost: Get Satisfaction offers plans ranging from free to $289/month and up.
Note: Mashable has an official support page on Get Satisfaction.
Feedbackify is a website widget that lets business owners ask specific questions of visitors (such as, “Rate our new design on a scale of 1 to 10″), and solicit feedback in customizable categories (such as, ideas, bug reports or general comments). The app is focused strictly on gathering feedback — there’s no way for users to vote up ideas or any way for you to reply to feedback from within the app. You do, however, get plenty of information about the submitter, so you can reply to any feedback on your own time.
SuggestionBox doesn’t bother with bug reports or customer service; it’s focused on soliciting ideas and suggestions from your customers. Like Get Satisfaction, your customers can make a SuggestionBox page for your company without your permission, so one may already exist.
The app is fairly straightforward: users submit ideas, other users can vote them up. Once a business has claimed its SuggestionBox, business owners can respond to suggestions or mark them as “Coming Soon” or “Implemented.”
Cost: SuggestionBox pricing starts at $49.50/month.
Kampyle is a feedback widget that, like Feedbackify, allows business owners to ask pointed questions. Unlike Feedbackify, Kampyle offers utilities to converse with customers from within the app via a built-in response system, as well as an automatic system that sends customers relevant responses based on the type of feedback they leave.
One of Kampyle’s strongest points is its analytics tools. The app integrates with Google Analytics, Omniture and Nedstate, which offers business owners better insight into how customers are interacting with a website. Kampyle also integrates with Salesforce.com for CRM.
Cost: Kampyle offers pricing for websites ranging from free to $499/month.
OpinionLab offers a suite of tools for gathering customer feedback from websites, mobile, social media, e-mail, and even in brick-and-mortar stores (from a store kiosk or mobile comment card app). The app offers a widget that can gather comprehensive feedback — from multiple choice questions to open response areas — and a number of different ways to solicit feedback (from e-mail invitations to opt-in buttons). Information is also gathered about the customers that are leaving feedback (such as their browser, operating system, time on site, referring page, etc.) and once feedback is collected it is algorithmically analyzed and sorted.
OpinionLab also offers solutions for monitoring social media for feedback your customers are leaving via other channels.
In practice, CrowdSound feels a lot like UserVoice. Customers click on your feedback widget where they can make suggestions (which can be bucketed in a category, left anonymously or made private), or they can vote up or down suggestions from other users. Users can also leave comments on feedback (and vote comments up and down).
Site owners can moderate, organize and respond to feedback from CrowdSound’s backend.
Cost: CrowdSound pricing ranges from free to $10/month and up.
IdeaScale offers a service for businesses to create branded customer suggestion communities, such as this one for Avid Pro Tools. These communities work more or less like the other idea-centric tools on this list: users submit an idea, other users can then discuss and vote on the idea (up or down). The most well-liked ideas bubble up to the top and business owners can respond to them or mark them as in review, in progress, or completed.
UserEcho is another straightforward feedback widget option. The app creates business communities — accessible via an embeddable widget — where customers can leave feedback and comment or vote on ideas or issues. Business owners can categorize feedback by tag, respond to it, or broadcast the status of a suggestion. UserEcho allows multiple staff members to respond to feedback and allows users to log in via accounts they already have, such as Facebook or Twitter.
Cost: UserEcho has plans available running from free to $59/month.
The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.
Quick Pitch: Projeqt is a creative storytelling platform.
Genius Idea: The art of online storytelling is all about presentation. As a non-linear storytelling engine, Projeqt gives creatives the ability to weave together stories dripping with style and personality from Flickr photos, RSS feeds, tweets, YouTube or Vimeo videos, and any media stored on their own computers.
The accidental startup came to be after creative director and co-founder David Lee was tasked with redesigning creative advertising agency TBWA‘s website to better display client work and do so in a Flash-free fashion that would work across any device. Projeqt was born then as a device agnostic web-publishing tool for TBWA and later spun off as its own entity.
Today, Projeqt is a private beta startup for the creative community with two primary use cases: a simple portfolio tool for artists to showcase their work and a presentation tool for brands and business users.
The service’s 2,700 beta testers have been using the platform for said purposes since its release in December. Projeqt users are also repurposing the experience for personal start pages, press rooms, virtual classrooms and even company websites, says Lee.
Users can craft “projeqts,” whatever their purpose may be, by adding content in the form of slides. Create a slide, name it, add tags, and fill the slide with a photo, text, video or feed. Slides are published to create the web story and be can reordered via drag and drop. Users can also create a projeqt within a projeqt to serve as a story inside a story.
More advanced users can tinker with the branding and design tools to adjust the appearance of the projeqt and add footer links and social network buttons.
In the coming months, Projeqt hopes to tap into additional social APIs — Instagram integration, for instance, is in the works and will allow users to display their Instagram photos in their projeqts. Also coming soon are theme options, though Lee insists that the startup won’t exactly follow the theme direction of WordPress or Tumblr.
Projeqt remains free for now, though the startup’s long-term plan is to develop a freemium model that would charge users for more advanced features.
Projeqt is graciously giving interested Mashable readers invites. Want in? Send an email to [email protected] with “Mashable” in the subject line.
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The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.
Over the last eighteen months, the world of web fonts and web typography has absolutely exploded. Modern browsers — on the desktop and on mobile devices — are embracing the WOFF standard, type foundries are adopting web type en masse, and libraries like Google Web Fonts are making it easier for designers and developers of all stripes to use web type in their projects.
The rise of web fonts has coincided with a greater cultural recognition of type in general. The hugely popular documentary Helvetica introduced a brand new audience to the power of type. For users who want to learn more about type and web fonts, the web is full of great resources that offer good examples of typography and explore the history and future of lettering and design.
Here are eight of our favorite sites to help you start or enhance your own education in type.
Fonts In Use is a beautiful site that, in its own words, aims to “catalog and examine real-world typography.”
A collaboration between Sam Berlow, Stephen Coles and Nick Sherman, the site offers insights and deep examinations of typography across various mediums.
This is a great site not just for typography fans, but also for those who want to learn more about what makes for effective typography and effective uses of type.
First launched in 2007, I Love Typography is the brainchild of John Boardley. The blog now has a host of contributors who highlight great fonts and showcase beautiful type, while also offering the reader a basic education in typography.
Through the years ILT has remained accessible to newcomers and that’s why we like it. Be sure to check out Boardley’s next project, Codex Magazine, which launches soon.
Typographica is a site that reviews typefaces and type books. It also offers commentary on fonts and various trends in typographic design.
The site isn’t updated on what we would call a “regular” basis, but the content within the site is timeless, making it a great place for type lovers to visit.
Typophile is a typographic community that has been on the web for nearly a decade. The forums are a fantastic resource for great finds in the world of type, and they’re also a great way to get proper feedback from other type lovers and design professionals.
Think of Typedia as the IMDb of typography — it’s a place where users can learn more about a typeface or font creator. Typedia also functions as a wiki, so anyone can join and add his own images, pages and information to the living, breathing typography tomb.
A must-subscribe-to section of the site is Type News, a weekly overview of the latest type news.
Webfonts.info is one of the best resources on the web for gathering information about web fonts and web font techniques.
Maintained by Ralf Hermann (whose own blog is a must read for type lovers), the site manages to be comprehensive and up-to-date. It’s also a wiki, which means that others can add their own information and updates to the mix.
Tim Brown is the type manager at Typekit. He also is responsible for the fantastic font blog and resource, Nice Web Type.
The main Nice Web Type site offers a great collection of past notes and access to Brown’s blog, however, we encourage users to also visit the Nice Web Type Tumblr.
The FontFeed is FontShop’s daily feed of typographic goodness. The site is chock-full of type recommendations, font news and great examples of digital type in the real world.
One of our favorite sections of the site is Type Tips, which highlights tips and tutorials, while also showcasing interviews with big names in the type world.
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Over the last eighteen months, the world of 
