ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michael Riedyk is CEO of DotGov, Inc. We're developing YouTown: a mobile platform for local government that will change the way how we interact with govt.
In the past few months, the DotGov team has been working on developing a mobile application for local government organizations. Our participating cities and county have been providing us with great feedback and insights and we really appreciate their help on this aspect of the development phase.
Our team has also grown very fast to an organization of 15 people working from 3 different continents: North America, Europe and Asia. On the upside, it means that we are able to literally work around the clock. The downside of being a “virtual company”, however, is that we could only meet and communicate through Skype and email – no chit-chat in the coffee corner or after work drinks. But so far, this kind of setup works well for our organization.
During the development process, one of the things that took quite a while was the branding/positioning of the application. We had to find an attractive name, a concept and a domain name that was still available, and that last thing was the biggest challenge of them all.
After days of discussions, we finally decided on the name “YouTown” (former codename: “CityLife”) since it reflects best what our mobile application will do, and that is to give you insight in everything that is going around in your city.
And to bring an attractive visual image to the brand, the designers worked for almost a month on our great new logo/icon and this is the result of their creativity and hard work:
Currently, we’re working on a new updated homepage design that will provide more information on the actual functionality of YouTown. The new homepage will be launched within 2 weeks so stay tuned!