Following the announcement that Kaizen Health was declared the winner of Grand Rapids’ Ford City of Tomorrow Challenge and Soofta and PikMyKid were the co-winners in the Miami-Dade Ford City of Tomorrow Challenge, the City of Pittsburgh announced this week that iomob, Safe Shift, and Intersection are the winners of its City of Tomorrow Challenge. The former two winners will each be rewarded $50,000 to help bring their proposals to fruition, while the latter declined prize money because its program will be able to sustain itself through ad revenue.
“The people of Pittsburgh were integral to this Challenge,” said Pittsburgh Mayor William Peduto. “They defined the need. Testing this in the real world, they will also help us evaluate this as a solution. We appreciate the partnership with Ford in not only thinking deeply about the challenges we face, but helping us to act quickly to find the ideas and entrepreneurs that can help address them.”
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Offering mobility as a service is the heart of iomob, an open-source platform that will allow mobility providers to address perceived inefficiencies while providing customers with the ability to locate the service that best fits their needs. Ideally, iomob would allow a commuter traveling entirely through ride-sharing and ride-hailing services to book an entire trip efficiently and affordably.
Safe Shift was created out of the Mobiliti Conference in Pittsburgh in October, matching up individuals from transportation and advocacy groups with students and Moovit, an analytics and data company focused on mobility. The objective is providing third-shift workers safer transportation options prior to and after working.
Intersection plans to create digital kiosks called LinkPGH around Pittsburgh to provide complimentary high-speed internet, phone services, messaging, and device charging.
“These proposals all focus on some of the issues that Pittsburgh residents shared with us during the community engagement phases of the Challenge,” said John Kwant, vice president, Ford City Solutions. “Working closely and collaborating with the people who will use solutions like these are one way in which we hope we can start to make a positive impact on people’s mobility.”
The winners were chosen out of a field of 125 initial proposals and 13 semifinalists. All winners and semifinalists worked with specially selected mentors and local accelerators to fine-tune their proposals heading into final submissions.
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