Show Summary
This past Sunday, September 9, episode 102 of Cyber Talk Radio hit the air on 1200 WOAI and iHeartRadio streaming. I was joined by Frank Robles of DigitalTown and Javier Guerra of TechQuarry to discuss building smart cities and creating mobile tools to make it easy to search, connect and buy local.
How can we help make San Antonio a smart city and help connect local businesses and people via the Internet?
This is where DigitalTown comes in to play. Frank has been a long-time San Antonio resident that is passionate about driving business within the community and not taking money out of it. He thinks a big part of this is helping connect businesses to the Internet. DigitalTown’s presence at Geekdom in downtown San Antonio facilitates the adoption of SanAntonio.city powered by DigitalTown. The mobile platform built on blockchain features free community tools for distribution of local interest content, news, events and projects. Since the platform is built on blockchain, the platform’s Smart Wallet feature also allows support for traditional and cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin. Not only does this make accepting multiple currencies more accessible than they were before, it gives the companies a QR Code point of sale system that includes multiple ledgers, which can make hacking more difficult.
Frank and Javier are both very passionate about supporting local businesses, they want to help give them a fighting chance as the percentage of businesses that have an online presence works its way towards 20 percent. To help fight this, a company that is a part of the DigitalTown community will not only have an online presence, but better search optimization to help drive local interest and sales.
Javier and Frank’s goal is to get the San Antonio community and businesses active on the DigitalTown platform. DigitalTown has made APIs available for anyone to use for free and play around with them in a sandbox. The DigitalTown API provides the ability to manage Verified Digital Identities, a Smart Wallet and Local Search with much more on the way. They believe that if they provide reliable, trustworthy API’s that it reduces execution risks for businesses. The platform supports multiple different coding languages like Python and PHP. Frank shares a few examples of apps being developed with the DigitalTown APIs such as medical collections and a CRM solution for yoga studios.
What does success look like five years from now?
Javier believes that a big step in progressing in the future is getting current college students, young entrepreneurs, businesses owners, and others in San Antonio connected to the local governments and to work together to support local businesses and the community. Frank believes good market penetration is a major goal for the cities that they are focusing in on. To achieve this, they need the community to sign up and interact with the platform. Frank and Javier already believe in the community and the potential that it offers. They believe it’s possible to bring more business back to our local communities if people sign up and use the DigitalTown platform!
Listen to the episode replay to hear more about Digital Town and how your business can get involved, here or watch below.**
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