Projects Update: MyUrbanAngel

Sue George reports on the progress made with MyUrbanAngel since CityCamp last year. First in a series of posts on projects from last year’s camp and where they’ve got to.

So, finally, finally, after what has been months but seemed like years, the MUA team have found a developer to work with us to develop a prototype for our app. Following CityCamp last March, we narrowed down who we are targeting the app at, learnt a lot more about what features they would like and how they would use it, and adapted our ideas as a result. We’ve also been working on our visual identity, got the barebones of a business plan in place and, most importantly, found out all the flaws in our initial idea.

We got to a stage where we were ready to start developing in the Summer but had very little interest in any of the adverts we put out. Maybe it was the timing, maybe we failed to tap into the right networks, maybe people are trying to tell us something. But could we find someone willing and able to do this work? We could not. So, without the technical skills to do this ourselves, we were, effectively, stuffed (technical term) and the project pretty much stalled.

Development of a prototype is now underway, however, and we’re all excited about having a chance to talk about it with all the clever, practical and experienced people at CityCamp in March. Hopefully you’ll be able to give us some feedback and help us overcome some of the technical and other challenges we have encountered so we can move the project onto its next stage.