Daniel Ponce

"Thanks to the popularity of smartphones, it is now possible to connect to the internet from practically any place in the world. Thus there are more and more citizen report platforms which take advantage of this power to build smarter and more inhabitable cities. CityHeroes, developed by Daniel Ponce and his partner, is one of them, with the distinguishing feature of having found the way to make this tool perform economically.

CityHeroes was designed for citizen alerts, and when Ponce tried to make it profitable he realized that ""many companies, public and private, have difficulties managing the work performed by their field staff,"" he recalls. So he redesigned the technology developed for CityHeroes and turned it into a new product, CityTroops. This tool offers companies the ability to monitor the physical location of their employees, and allows them to generate and send reports from any location. Thanks to this innovation, Ponce has been selected as one of MIT Technology Review, Spanish Edition´s Innovators Under 35 Paraguay and Bolivia 2016.

With CityTroops, the company has a dashboard which reflects the position of all of their field agents in real time, as if they were citizen traffic alerts. Each one of these agents has a personalized app on their mobile phones where they can generate these reports, which range from safety reports to censuses, according to the company´s needs.

""Any company that has field agents has two problems: knowing where their employees are and receiving the information that they collect,"" the young, Bolivian entrepreneur highlights. ""It´s surprising to see how large companies use such obsolete technology, like a pen and paper,"" he adds. And ""its philosophy still consists of making cities safer,"" CityHeroes founder stresses. Ponce confirms that his company is already in an advanced stage of negotiations with a Bolivian municipality to implement this platform for managing the local police force.

""It can also incorporate information from sensors connected to the internet, like smoke detectors,"" Ponce adds, to explain CityTroop´s integration with the internet.

According to the professor from the Federal State University of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) and jury member for the Innovators Under 35 Paraguay and Bolivia 2016 awards, Renata Araujo, ""Ponde has a powerful entrepreneurial profile, with ample experience in taking products to market, and should be congratulated for the success of CityHeroes."""