Wildblotter keeps you informed about crime in your neighborhood

Last year, Jack Robert was sitting in the kitchen of his new home in Eastern Washington. Being a father of 2 young boys combined with transplanting from Seattle, Jack wanted a quick pulse on crime in the little town of Chelan, Washington. Surely it would be something much less than Western Washington, but how could he really know?

Thus began a quest to figure out how Chelan fared from a crime perspective. He scoured the local paper, the web, as well as the local courthouse and police station websites for articles and police blotter information. He then took one more obvious step and did a Google mapping of registered sex offenders in the area on Family Watchdog.

"After nearly 4 hours, I had a fairly clear idea of crime in the area," Jack recalls, "But I should not have had to search so many places for this information - it should not have taken so long."

A former product manager and market analyst from Seattle, Jack set out to see if there was a way to bring all of this information to a single sight for people. Wildblotter was born.

Wildblotter indexes and aggregates data on crime from over 20,000 cities nationwide, and integrates sex offender mapping into a single website. People can also set up alerts for keywords and types of crime that they want to be contacted about. Robert says that the site has become popular for people that want to keep abreast of crime activity in their neighborhood. The free service is ad supported and serves over 177,000 users nationwide, but growth is skyrocketing as parents and neighbors spread the word.

Wildblotter's team of 3 is now working on some tools that users have requested; online tools to help organize and run neighborhood watches, and some tools to help users compare crime relative to other neighborhoods.

"Our data sources are neither perfect nor complete, so it can be challenging to help people compare crime with other locations," says Robert of their site. Missing persons and Amber Alert data feeds are currently in the works.

While basic ads keep the lights on, Wildblotter is in discussion with companies like ADT, Americas Most Wanted's Safety Center, and Dateline NBC. Partnerships like these will further strengthen Wildblotter's value proposition. Other discussions are ongoing which would make Wildblotter a web service for other site, a much more distributed model.

PicturePal launches beta

I have been following the stealth startup PicturePal for sometime. Unfortunately under NDA, I was unable to post anything about it - until now. This weekend, some of the most popular resort destinations on the island of Kauai will feature PicturePal kiosks for guests to upload their pictures from their digital camera memory cards.

Founder Sommer Jayson has been developing this offering for the last 10 months, "On my last trip to the islands, I was struck by the fact that every tourist struggled with the same problem as I did." Jayson, on an extended family vacation with a party of 12, found she had used up all of her camera memory in the first 2 days. On a quest to buy more memory, she found not only that prices for memory were very inflated on the resort island, but most memory types including hers were out of stock.

Jayson's ONLY CHOICE was to stand in a hellishly long line for the Kodak Picture Maker and go through the painful process of selecting which of the hundreds of photos she wanted to print out.

"I was really annoyed that I was spending my precious vacation time sorting through photos and printing them out. Unfortunately this was my only choice," Jayson recalls.

PicturePal aims to solve this problem by offering resort and hotel lobby kiosks that allow guests to simply upload their pictures to a secure web folder, allowing them to clear their memory for another day of picture taking. When their vacation is over and they are back at home, they can simply access their photos to download, print, share, or buy prints online.

Even better is the cost of the service: FREE.

Jayson believes that by offering the upload service for free, that other revenue opportunities will surface with online photo companies. In fact, Kodak and Yahoo have already been calling the small Seattle-based firm, wanting to initiate partnering discussions.

From our perspective, we see PicturePal taking advantage of two key trends that show no indication of slowing: (1) Digital cameras continue to offer more megapixels despite the diminishing returns to the casual photosnapper. This will in turn drive the demand and cost for digital memory. (2) No matter how many Gigs a memory card is, it never seems to be enough for digital photographers. While digital allows photographers to take and review multiples of the same picture and then delete the bad ones, our theory is that few have the discipline to delete the bad photos.

As long as digital memory is in constant shortage for vacationers, PicturePal should see strong growth. I will be watching the PicturePal team, seems like they are onto something...