Oil Reporter Mobile Application Uses Crowdsourcing to aid Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill Recovery Effort

Volunteer Appcelerator Titanium Mobile Developers Help Response Organizations Pinpoint Location and Lessen Severity of Damage

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIF. – May 26, 2010 – Appcelerator®, the leading platform for rapidly developing native mobile, desktop, and iPad applications using web technologies, today announced that Appcelerator Titanium would power Oil Reporter for Android and iPhone. The mobile app was created for Crisis Commons by Intridea, using Titanium’s cross-platform technology. Oil Reporter enables trained citizen journalists to use their mobile phones to capture and upload quantitative and qualitative data, as well as geo-tagged photos and videos to help in the recovery effort.  Appcelerator also announced that it has started a volunteer mobile application developer recruitment initiative initially targeting its 47,000 application developers.  Volunteer developers will aid NGO organizations in building applications to pinpoint damaged areas based on Oil Reporter geo-tagged data.

The April 20th explosion aboard the offshore drilling rig Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico caused a massive spill, sending an estimated 5,000 barrels of oil per day into the Gulf. As the spill nears shore, mobile phone users can provide important eyewitness accounts to help public sector response organizations track and respond more swiftly to the crisis.

Real-time Check-ins via Smartphones

iPhone and Android smartphone users who download Oil Reporter (http://oilreporter.org/) will be asked a series of questions about their eyewitness account, including what they see in front of them, the viscosity of the oil, and whether they see injured or dead wildlife. Users can also attach a photo or video, which are geo-tagged and time/date stamped for accurate reporting, and they can tweet their data.

Government agencies that want to use Oil Reporter for gathering and reporting agency-specific data can also do so. Agencies simply log into Oil Reporter and enter their organization ID to ensure their data is filtered and captured separately on the back-end.

"With a quick-moving crisis such as the Gulf Coast oil spill, every second that oil is spilling into the Gulf counts," said Jeff Haynie, CEO at Appcelerator. "By enabling Intridea and Crisis Commons to quickly create a mobile app that lets users of today’s most popular smartphones report first-hand damage, we are hopeful that aid workers can stem the tide of this massive spill and reduce its harmful effects."

"When Crisis Commons came to us to build the Oil Reporter app, we knew we wanted to build on Appcelerator," said Brendan Lim, Director of Mobile Development at Intridea. "With Titanium, we used our web skills to build a rich, interactive native app for iPhone and Android in just a few days.  This application could not have been otherwise developed on both platforms in such a tight timeframe.  We anticipate developers will leverage Oil Reporter’s crowdsource data and Appcelerator’s open source app creation platform to create many more innovative mashups and apps that will assist recovery efforts."

Crowdsourced Data Open Sourced for New Apps

Crowdsourced data collected from the Oil Reporter app will be shared in open and accessible data feeds freely available to response organizations, academic institutions such as San Diego State University’s Visualization Center and others via www.oilreporter.org. Developers can easily import this data and use open source tools such as Appcelerator Titanium to create new tracking applications to lend in the recovery.

Call for Volunteer Developers to Localize Oil Tracker App To Scale Response to Crisis

Appcelerator announced that it will tap its 47,000 Titanium Developers to ask for volunteers to collaborate with governmental institutions and animal rescue organizations. Recruited developers will be matched up with these organizations for a coordinated joint effort to better identify hotspots for crisis mitigation and protection of the natural environment, wildlife, etc.  For example, Oil Tracker, a complementary heat map app that will be made available for iPhone, Android, and iPad leverages Google Maps and Oil Reporter wildlife data to show where there is the greatest concentration of dead or dying wildlife.  Oil Tracker is being open-sourced to the development community along with Oil Reporter.

Using crowdsourcing on the front end and a mobilized development effort on the backend enables an effective, online data collection and dissemination mechanism, so that organizations can have better insight and make better decisions to assign task forces to handle such a crisis.  This level of collaboration by crisis response organizations, such as Crisis Commons, governmental agencies, technology vendors, and developers represents a bigger, broader effort at how harnessing technology can enable a more effective response to a national crisis.

To further support the recovery effort, Appcelerator will donate 100% of the first month’s proceeds to the National Wildlife Federation for any developer who signs up for a Titanium Professional subscription. Developers need only sign up at http://bit.ly/aPiglu and use promo code: "savethegulf". Appcelerator is now taking volunteer developer signups to customize building a mashup with Oil Reporter through the following website: http://bit.ly/bJPP01.  Volunteers will be matched up with other NGO organizations over the next few weeks.

About Appcelerator

Appcelerator enables web developers, ad agencies, ISVs, and enterprises to take advantage of the explosive growth in mobile, desktop, and iPad applications.  The company’s flagship offering, Titanium, is the only open source platform to enable cross-platform development, from a single codebase, at web development speed for these three platforms.  Appcelerator’s customers can leverage their exiting skills and open, industry standard technologies to decrease time-to-market and development costs, increasing customer adoption and revenues, and enjoying greater flexibility and control. For more information, please visit www.appcelerator.com.

Appcelerator is a registered trademark of Appcelerator, Inc.  Appcelerator Titanium is a trademark of Appcelerator, Inc.

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