Trimble helps clean up for Super Bowl 50

With 70,000 football fans and thousands of others descending on Santa Clara, Calif., near San Jose, for Sunday’s Super Bowl 50 matchup between the Denver Broncos and Carolina Panthers, it’s a perfect opportunity for businesses to clean up. But a company with presences in Broomfield and Boulder is helping San José clean up — literally.

Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Trimble Navigation Ltd. (Nasdaq: TRMB), which has offices at 10368 Westmoor Drive in Broomfield and 4730 Walnut St., Suite 301, in Boulder, is using its geospatial technology to help the city more efficiently spruce up in advance and then spot and pick up trash the visiting hordes leave around the various Super Bowl-related events so that San Jose looks its best in the world media spotlight.

Key players in the cleanup are TerraFlex field data capture software, developed at Trimble Geospatial in Broomfield, and a San Jose State University-based organization called CommUniverCity, which partners with underserved communities in the city to give students experience in solving neighborhood issues.

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TerraFlex is a cloud-based solution for managing and streamlining data collection from a mobile device, eliminating the need to transcribe written notes.

“For the clean-up campaign, San Jose had ‘spotters’ and drivers,” said Rick Gosalvez, local government market manager for Trimble. “The spotters were the students, city staff and CommUniverCity people. While the drivers traversed the street routes, the spotters collected data in Trimble TerraFlex, which was automatically synced and mapped to the cloud for office staff to preview and use for analysis and planning.”

The city identified key “hotspots” where illegal dumping was likely to occur, helping CommUniverCity map out four square miles of potential sites. Using TerraFlex, project leaders created data-collection forms including fields for location of trash — such as along sidewalks, medians or fence lines — as well as the type of trash, how accessible it was and whether it was electronic or hazardous material.

Once the dumping sites were identified, CommUniverCity created maps so trash haulers could easily find the sites and clean up the trash.

Even after the game is over and the crowds have departed, San Jose plans to use the data TerraFlex gathered to help deter illegal dumping and make the city cleaner and safer in the future.