Local teams win Go Code Colorado competition

DENVER — Teams from Boulder and Fort Collins were among the winners in the annual Go Code Colorado competition, which asks teams to use public data to develop useful business insights, analyses and tools.

Four winning teams  were announced at the event Thursday at the Exdo Event Center in Denver. Competition occurred in two tracks: Analytics and Product. More than 40 teams and almost 200 individuals from across Colorado competed in the 2019 competition, with winning teams pitching business solutions for industries that ranged from food-truck owners to civil engineers.

“This year’s finalists proved that with the help of public data, we can tackle unique challenges and create innovative solutions for Colorado,” Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold said in a prepared statement.

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The Go Code Colorado competition is hosted by the Business Intelligence Center at the Colorado Secretary of State’s office. In the six years since its inception, hundreds of developers, designers, business professionals, analysts, and entrepreneurs have participated in the competition.

Go Code Colorado conducted kickoff events for the four-month challenge on the Western Slope and Front Range in February. In March, teams attended Challenge Day, where they worked with mentors, attended classes and met additional teammates. At the Final Competition Event, the winning teams pitched their business ideas to a panel of judges representing Colorado’s tech community and state and local government.

The judges chose the four winners by considering if the team’s submission is new and different, adds value to Colorado businesses, uses public data and would help businesses make data-driven decisions. The judges also weighed a separate technical evaluation of each product and their live-pitch at the finals on Thursday.

Winners included:

Business Product Track

• Trackers, Boulder, for an app named Position my Kitchen, which provides food-truck vendors with a Web application to locate optimum sites and times using public data about brewery and office locations, pedestrian traffic, farmers markets and Colorado events in combination with demographic data.
• EnrollMe, Denver, for a Web application that visualizes public-school performance data so administrators of charter schools, new owners of charter schools and business owners seeking a new location can see high-performing schools in a variety of metrics such as current or historical performance metrics and financial history. The tool would help users determine how to open a new school or decide in which neighborhood to locate their business so their employees have access to quality education for their children.

Business Analytics Track

• FlowCodeColorado, Fort Collins, for analysis that forecasts when water surplus will be released downstream (aka “free river” events) based on publicly available historical data to inform owners of oil and gas companies when they can capture water required for their processing that would otherwise be required to purchase at non-surplus times.
• Sucesso, Denver, for analysis providing pavement pricing and forecasting, combined with public data on highway quality and projected project needs for civil engineers and construction materials procurement buyers looking to utilize recycled materials in future projects.