March 26, 2014
A PDC proposal to encourage early adoption of technologies through public-private partnership received the green light from Mayor Charlie Hales’ Innovation Fund, a $1 million program to ignite creative ideas within city government. The proposed Early Adopter program is a strategy to match the talents and services of our local tech industry to city bureau needs for operations, maintenance and capital projects, addressing issues in the public sector while giving local Portland companies greater access to a potential customer base.
A recent example of a successful match between government and industry has been the partnership between TriMet and GlobeSherpa, a mobile ticketing platform. TriMet recently implemented the ticketing platform into its own systems. Within the first month, the platform sold 100,000 tickets, translating into $450,000 in sales. TriMet’s cost for selling electronic tickets is significantly less than the traditional paper ticket, which has the agency promoting the mobile ticketing solution throughout Portland to an overwhelmingly positive response from customers. GlobeSherpa can use the positive promotion to market its service to other transit authorities across the country.
Contact Jared Wiener at PDC for more information.
