What is JC Decaux peddling?

23-09-2009

by Ralph Averbuch

A free iPhone app to help commuters gets the axe from heavy-handed backer of Dublinbikes.

We live in times, or at least we appear to, where we’re all increasingly expected to do our bit for the environment. To that end we put out recycling, use public transport more and some even use technology, such as freecycle, to swap rather than bin old items we no longer need. So when Dublinbikes came on the scene, providing easy pick-up and drop-off cycle rental around city centre Dublin, it didn’t take long for the enterprising folks at Fusio to mash up the information from the Dublinbikes website into a handy real-time iPhone application which could tell you where your nearest bicycle pick-up and drop-off point was, as well as how many cycles were available at each of the 40 points around central Dublin. This is an ideal solution, providing people on the move with exact information whilst out and about. Arguably it's more useful than the actual website for regular users of the service. To date Fusio's application, which it developed and provided at no charge from Apple’s App Store, has been downloaded 3,000 times, making it one of the most popular Irish iPhone tools. So it seems hard to understand what bright spark decided it would be a good idea to jump on Fusio for using their initiative, instead serving the developer with a Cease and Desist letter telling them to take down the app and not make it available any more. Incredibly the order came from JC Decaux which specialises in the Irish outdoor advertising market and is a financial backer of the Dublinbikes initiative. Now this is an advertising specialist so it’s hard to countenance who thought that it would be good PR to ride roughshod over a small tech developer for trying to help people to find cycles around Dublin available for hire, thus encouraging people out of cars and onto bikes, reducing congestion and pollution, improving health... yada, yada, yada... Someone at JC Decaux should be getting on their bike and making way for a more enlightened and collaborative approach to how we can all pedal in the same direction and do our bit for the environment.

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