Boris’s Bikes and Open Data
photo credit: Charlotte Gilhooly I’m an early adopter, or possibly a serial alpha tester. I’m always willing to give something new a go, especially when it comes to new ways to get around my city, London. I was first off the block to get an Oyster card – a fantastic innovation that has transformed Tube and Bus travel, in my opinion. I was an early customer of the “OnePulse” combined Oyster-Visa-contactless payment card – less than fantastic, but that’s the subject of another post. So it should come as no surprise that I was one of the first to sign up for the new “Cycle Hire” scheme in London – cheerily called “Boris’s Bikes” by the press. (Us Londoners know they’re really Ken’s bikes but “Ken’s Bikes” suffers from a lack of aliteration so “Boris’s Bikes” it is.) They probably had enough work to do just launching the service and getting basic e-commerce systems up and running to worry about mobile app development and I’m aso guessing they didn’t have the expertise in house (though that’s just a guess). Many companies and organizations launching new services, particularly in government, might be in similar situations. They could have decided to bag mobile all together, but that would have been shortsighted. Clearly, this is a service that needed a mobile component. So, as reported in the Guardian, TFL decided not to roll their own mobile app associated with the service but rather opened the field up budding mobile developers. They did so by releasing their data as an API to the …