Anthony Deaver

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ACCESSIBLE PLACES SELECTED AS A 2011 MITX INNOVATION
AWARDS FINALIST
Mobile Site Recognized for Innovation

BOSTON MA (May 5, 2011) – Accessible Places today announced its mobile web app has been selected as a finalist in the Best “Doing Good” Innovation category for the MITX Innovation Awards. Held annually by the Massachusetts Innovation & Technology Exchange, the MITX Innovation Awards celebrates the innovations powering the future of marketing and revolutionizing the way we work and play.

“This year’s finalists blew us away with their creativity, ingenuity and passion for innovation. They are truly reflective of the many exciting things that are driving our industry right now,” said MITX president, Debi Kleiman. “We’re proud to showcase the region’s top innovations through this Awards program – giving these innovators a place to shout loud and proud about what they’ve achieved,”

Accessible Places is an app that uses crowd-sourced data to go one step beyond your typical ‘handicap’ mapping site or app. By allowing people on the street to designate what types of accessibility attributes a location has, such as curb cuts or powered doors, we learn not just that the location is accessible but HOW it is accessible. Is it easy to get to? Are the elevators, escalator and ramps (if there are any) easy to find? What type of entrance does it have?

There are over 60 million people in the US that are consider disabled for one reason or the other.

In most cases they are unable to find the information they need to determine if a location is accessible to their needs, and when they do find that information, be it through website or phone call, it is often misleading or unclear. When they are able to gain access to a location the conditions are often less than ideal. The mechanisms needed to give them complete access are often, cramped, unsanitary, confining, or in some cases, outright dangerous.
Accessible Places will be recognized with the other finalists in the category of Best “Doing Good” Innovation at the ceremony traditionally attended by over 350 of the region’s top interactive marketing and technology professionals. Winners will be announced at the ceremony in the Westin Boston Waterfront on Thursday, June 16th at 6pm. Tickets can be purchased at www.mitxawards.org/innovation.

The 2011 MITX Awards are sponsored by: Digitas, Isobar, The Atom Group, DLA Piper, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Boston Innovation, and Metropolis Creative.

About Accessible Places
Founded in 2011, Accessible Places sheds light on our communities, easily showing how accessible locations are. Our goal is to allow any user to plan their daily life by mapping out how to navigate a traditionally poorly built physical space. By contributing your experiences and observations you will help yourself and others while increasing awareness of accessibility problems.

About MITX
Established in 1996, MITX — the Massachusetts Innovation & Technology Exchange — is the leading industry organization focused on the web and mobile, bringing together the digital marketing, media and technology community to engage in what’s next and how it will impact the marketing and business worlds. Connecting more than 7,500 professionals in New England, MITX is a dynamic community of thought leaders and collaborators in search of insight, education and opportunity. Creator of FutureM, MITX is located in Cambridge, MA. For more information, visit http://www.mitx.org/.

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If you follow me on twitter you know I’ve been whining about how lousy my week has been. Can’t seem to get out of my own way, etc… Sorry about that. At 9:21 am this morning all that went away, and nothing short of the end of the world will bring it back. That’s when Beck left a message for me on my cell saying Accessible Places was a finalist for the 2011 MITX Innovation awards.

If the world got a little brighter about that time it was me grinning like an idiot.

Maybe it’s no big deal for some to be nominated and make it to being a finalist, but for a couple friends that built something on a whim over 48 hours, and has had an avalanche of interest since launch it’s awesome. If you want deep detail about what AP is you can check out my post about it here, but the basics are: we built it at the Boston.com hack-a-thon based on the seed of an idea from my wife where we ended up winning ‘Best use of Geo-Location’. Since we have been approached by Code for America about keeping the data open and having them consume it into their Open Civic dataset. We’ve also been approached by CitiRoller about also taking our data once we get a reasonable amount.

We’ve had a meeting with the Boston Commissioner for Persons with Disabilities to work with the city to get their existing data cleaned up and put into our system to help build a better system for people to get where they want to go safely.

Now we are finalists for MITX.

All in 2 months, and all without any kind of promotion. Everything has been word of mouth to this point.

Your head swimming yet? Mine is. The original plan has us here next year. So, as Sam said at the presentation Tuesday night, we went through our One Year plan in 2 months. Now we are trying to figure out the next steps.

Speaking of the presentation, those that know me know I hate presenting. Especially when I’m talking about myself or something I built. I get nervous, tunnel vision, the whole thing. Even as a kid I sucked at presenting in front of the class or at the science/art/whatever fair. I failed to get into the theater class in high school (where I figured I could fix the problem) because I was so bad.

I made it through without sounding too much like an idiot, thanks in no small part to Sam. The stupid part is, once the ‘presenting’ is over and the Q&A starts I’m fine. No nerves, no tunnel vision, nothing. Like I said, stupid. Best part is that after we were done every judge gave us their card and said they knew someone that would love to work with us on this. It’s mindblowing that we are getting all this attention.

Anyway, that nightmare is over and now all I have to do is wait until June 16th to see if we win. I’m actually okay if we don’t win because we’ve come so far and being a finalist this soon in the lifecycle is a special thing. Plus we made some great contacts at the presentation, and I’m sure we will make more at the event in June.

But I so want to win.

Just hope I don’t throw up if we do :)