“When you see a problem, you can take a photo of it, and by virtue of taking a photo of it, we’ve captured your GPS coordinates,” said David Kralik, director of marketing for CitySourced, the company that designed the application. CitySourced has partnered with the 1st District’s Councilman Pete Constant to spearhead the project, which utilizes Microsoft and Bing’s mapping system.

Reports of neighborhood problems are sent to the councilman’s office for resolution. And residents are notified when their requests are received and being reviewed.

By calling upon residents to report these complaints, Kralik thinks reports will be more accurate and will shift the responsibility from public officials to residents.

The overall cost to San Jose was only $4,500, Kralik said, since the city is a charter customer, but many factors affect pricing. However, Mobile City Hall will garner accurate reports and save the city money in the long haul.

“The application works in 1,900 cities nationwide,” said Kralik. Users can also report problems in other states they’re visiting, unlike New York City’s and Boston’s mobile iPhone apps that are only specific to those regions.

Although Mobile City Hall works in 1,900 U.S. cities, Kralik said these cities can’t access the dashboard system that lets San Jose analyze its reports. “San Jose gets a really cool metrics dashboard that they can slice and dice the data. Whereas the cities we work in, but aren’t paying us, don’t get that — they get a basic report sent to them,” Kralik said.