11 Apr CivTechSA Residency Celebration
Last night’s event was AMAZING! Thank you so much to everyone who showed up to celebrate the 2018 CivTechSA Residency Program winners, Kinetech Cloud and Reckon Point. We had a great turn out from the Geekdom community, including: the CivTechSA Mentors from USAA and Innocenti Jones, EPIcenter, Innov8 Place, Promotor.io, and more. The City of San Antonio came out in full force to support the Residency winners, too, which just speaks to how much San Antonio, as a whole, is involved in this Program and these startups.
In addition to the Department of Human Services, the Aviation Department and Information Technology Systems Department for the City, the Assistant City Manager Maria Villagomez, Chief Innovation Officer Jose De La Cruz, and Innovation Manager Kate Kinnison came out as well to celebrate the success of their efforts in the Office of Innovation in spurring the CivTechSA Program, and to help kick off the first-ever CivTechSA Residency.
As David Garcia, CEO of Geekdom said yesterday, Geekdom is incredibly proud to have two of our member companies selected for this unique opportunity, and we are certain that Kinetech Cloud and Reckon Point were the right choice to tackle these challenges.
The City Manager, Sheryl Sculley, introduced our Residency Program winners and spoke of the City’s excitement for the necessary solutions the startups will be working on and the positive impact they will have on the San Antonio community.
Over the next 16 weeks, the startups will work closely with the DHS and Aviation department and the City of San Antonio to build custom solutions for residents and travelers. In August, the startups will then present their solutions to the City and the Community at a Demo Day presentation for the chance to get a contract with the City of San Antonio.
Kinetech Cloud is a cloud-native company combining full-service business consulting, agile software development and enterprise support, and will be responsible for solve the Department of Human Services’ Utility Assistance Challenge. 
Mike Guido CEO of Kinetech Cloud said, “Of the seven opportunities for innovation the City outlined, we felt the DHS challenge aligned with our core competency around workflow improvement and digitizing paper-based processes. We are honored to be selected from such a competitive field of applicants and are excited to get started with the Residency.”
The Utility Assistance Challenge is centered around streamlining the current application system for residents that need utility assistance. Currently, the only way to apply is to mail-in or drop off paper applications with required documentation at a central location. This means that the City has to manually sort through each application to determine eligibility and establish assistance.
Kinetech Cloud’s solution will pre-screen eligibility, send automatic updates to applicants, and validate all required documentation before allowing submission; which will drastically improve the client experience while streamlining workflow for the City of San Antonio.
Reckon Point offers industry-leading LiDAR services, such as indoor surveys, maps and wayfinding, and indoor-positioning estimations. They will focus on the Airport Challenge to collect and manage flight information as well as unify the Airports current mapping applications.
Gabriel Garza of Reckon Point said yesterday, “We are very excited to bring the technology we have been developing over the last 3 years to the San Antonio Airport. We have been working on the core indoor positioning and navigation algorithms, and feel that now is the right time to put them to use in a large scale project. This will help modernize the user experience at the airport by allowing people to locate and navigate the airport with ease, and alleviate a lot of the travel stress that passengers experience in an unknown place.”
This is only the beginning, and we cannot wait to see what comes next!
For more information about the CivTechSA Program, reach out to us at civtechsa@geekdom.com.