Adopt Me!

Submitted to the Palo Alto Hackathon before 2/28/14 5pm PST by @PAHomelessDogs
In green is from the Hackathon submission page. In black is what we wrote.
Now, tell us about your awesome app idea... Provide a short and snappy idea name. *
For example: "Click and Fix" or "City Voice"

Adopt Me!
Describe your idea here *
Tell us specifically what it will do and what problem it will solve. This is the most important area. Be sure to be clear and detailed. Adopt Me! is a SaaS application that would pull animal data that Palo Alto Animal Services (PAAS) already puts into their existing system (Chameleon Beach Software Products), massage it appropriately, and automatically distribute via APIs to appropriate social networks e.g. Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube, Google Groups (for email), Facebook, GooglePlus, SurveyMonkey, Yahoo Groups, etc. along with popular adoptable animal search tools e.g. Petfinder, Adopt-A-Pet (exact list and priorities TBD) Our prototype may just implement one or two of these interfaces as a Proof-of-Concept, but with an extensible architecture so that more social media systems can be added. Chameleon Beach (ancient client-server software) does not have any public facing interfaces except with the PetHarbor website, which is not one of the most popular sites that the public uses to find animals. Right now the shelter staff must manually update every social network by hand, separately (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Petfinder, YouTube, others?) which is clearly a laborious task, and based on our observations not high on their list of priorities. Why does this matter? As far as we know, the only marketing of adoptable animals by the shelter is done thru social media, by hand, sporadically and incompletely. There does not appear to be any email or paper mail outreach to past adopters, potential adopters, owners of licensed dogs, or donors. There is no email signup form on the PAAS website. Without marketing, not only do adoptable pets languish in the shelter, but the residents of Palo Alto (and Los Altos and Los Altos Hills, who are also served by the shelter), and people in other nearby communities, are not made aware of wonderful dogs, cats, rabbits, guinea pits, and birds that are homeless in our wealthy town, lonely and desperate in bare-bones kennels and cages waiting for someone to stop in. Many, perhaps most, residents do not even know that the shelter has adoptable pets, or that the shelter even exists. Marketing of shelter pets is a proven way to increase adoptions. As a side effect, it should also improve the awareness of required licenses for dogs, and perhaps create an uptick in compliance (which we estimate to currently be
Contact email: paloaltohomelessdogs@gmail.com | phone: 650 215-8406

Adopt Me!
Submitted to the Palo Alto Hackathon before 2/28/14 5pm PST by @PAHomelessDogs
around 20%), thus increasing shelter revenue. And most important, higher visibility will reduce unnecessary euthanasia. Informational note: Petfinder and Adopt-A-Pet appear to be the highest trafficked sites; Petfinder is used by the Humane Society of America for their wildly popular and successful program The Shelter Pet Project; and Petfinder is also the tool recommended by ASPCA.)

Tell us why you think this is an original idea. *

For example: Describe why you believe you are solving a problem in a unique manner. We believe many shelters use Chameleon Beach Software to manage their shelter business and animals. However Chameleon seems to be stuck with 20th century technology and services.
Chameleon/CMS is a front end application that utilizes the latest in Client/Server network technology. It operates under Microsoft Windows to manage and track all the data any animal care facility (animal control, humane control, humane society, SPCA, ARL, AWL, etc.) will handle. Charts, graphs, spreadsheets, notices, and reports are shipped with the product and easily produced and customized using the report writing tools.

While there is no doubt that a startup somewhere is disrupting their business with a cloud-based solution, in the meantime animals are dying in shelters because of poor marketing. Our application is original and unique in that it takes what shelters are using now, extracts the data, and provides social media marketing outreach with no additional shelter staff time, effort, or training. (Note: tools such as Hootsuite exist but as far as we know they do not interface with legacy databases. They are also way too complicated for most shelter staff to use.) We could conceivably sell our application to Chameleon Beach Software, or better yet, make it open source and let others help maintain and distribute it to shelters that have limited budgets, no IT support, and ancient clientserver management software. We have a fabulous opportunity given the wealth of the citys residents, the technology prowess of the residents and city IT staff, our leadership by the Palo Alto CIO, and the high visibility of tech companies like Google (that are dog friendly), and animal-loving tech entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg (read about his famous dog Beast) to help not only our own shelter, but those around the country, even the world. Lets become not just the Most Digital City in America, but also use that digital prowess to become the Most Humane City in America.

If your idea will require data, tell us what type of data.

For example: City demographics, permit information, event listings etc. Leave this item blank if you don't know or it's not relevant to your idea. Animal data from the PAAS Chameleon Beach Software database.
Contact email: paloaltohomelessdogs@gmail.com | phone: 650 215-8406

Adopt Me!
Submitted to the Palo Alto Hackathon before 2/28/14 5pm PST by @PAHomelessDogs
Finally, some important miscellaneous items...
If you are selected as a finalist, tell us how you will go about creating a prototype * For example: Will you write the code yourself? Do you have access to developers? We are a small team of people with a variety of skills including software development (internet, SaaS, mobile), project management, cloud/web product management, business analysis, photography, design, social media, animal welfare, and marketing. One of us is a very experienced developer in mobile and web-based apps, another of us currently works as a software engineering manager in a startup. If we are selected as a finalist we may reach out to the open source community (via GitHub for example) to find additional programmers. We believe many techies are animal lovers and that we can quickly bring a few more additional developers on board if needed.

Anything else?
Use this space to include anything additional that you would like to share with the judges or competition administrators We are continuing to gather information about the shelter operations and use it to refine our thinking and app proposal(s). We appreciate OpenGov/OpenData means we have access to important documents/data about the shelter such as license compliance, revenue sources and amounts, euthanasia rates and reasons, etc. This link is to a document folder on Dropbox
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/wcfxdydvnflqqh6/cPFq9APuc2

where we have placed the information that we have. We are eager to increase our knowledge of PAAS operations, financials, etc. so that we can work together to have better successful outcomes for our homeless companion animals.

Contact email: paloaltohomelessdogs@gmail.com | phone: 650 215-8406