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#Hack4Detroit Winner Creates Family-Friendly Bicycling App

By Edward Cardenas

DETROIT (CBS Detroit) - Developers who created an app to help people discover, create and share bike routes in the city won the $5,000 grand at the 24-hour #hack4detroit hackathon.

The event, sponsored by Automation Alley, challenged participants to build an app using the city of Detroit's new Open Data Portal to "navigate family-friendly activities in the city of Detroit," organizers stated.

"#hack4detroit was a tremendous success thanks to the hard work of Automation Alley, Grand Circus and all of our talented participants who spent 24 hours creating mobile applications to benefit the citizens of Detroit. Automation Alley has and will continue to be a supporter of Detroit's rebirth," said Ken Rogers, Automation Alley executive director, said in a release. "We continue to be extremely impressed with the diversity and level of technical talent our region has to offer and that was on full display at #hack4detroit."

The winning app was created by Abdul Miah, co-founder and principal engineer at rankedHiRe, and Imran Raja, senior software engineer at MB Financial, during the hackathon June 12-13 at Grand Circus Detroit.

Miah, of Novi, and Raja, of Canton, built a mobile web app called Ride4Detroit that uses data provided by the city of Detroit to create and share bike routes in the city and even report issues as they bike through Detroit.

 

Judges included Beth Niblock, CIO of the City of Detroit; Sean Hurwitz, CEO of Pixo; Brian Balasia, CEO of Digerati; and Will McDowell, Business Analyst at Detroit Labs.

Second place winners included PishPosh.TV  founders Ben Duell Fraser and Michael Evans, who is also a senior developer at Loveland Technologies. The third place winner was Jonathan Werber, a developer at Nexient.

Last year, #hack4detroit participants created and app for the Detroit Public Library.

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