Granite City Neighbors is all about community - for and between community members.

Serving residents and visitors of St. Cloud, and the surrounding communities, Granite City Neighbors provides information that truly matters - as it happens, in a trusted environment that all participants are passionate about and have a vested interest in: their town.

A big high school game on Saturday between the local team and its rival? A festival or sidewalk sale taking place on main street? Upcoming construction scheduled at the town’s busiest intersection? A special cause for kids at the park this weekend? Early school closures before the expected afternoon snowfall?

Granite City Neighbors creates for local residents and businesses a mobile community that enables real-time, location-based communication.

The service’s home screen features a real-time bulletin board displaying posts from all active users within the community. These messages are delivered as push notifications as events unfold, providing users with real-time information that’s relevant to their community.

Community members can use the service to exchange location-based messages or ‘flags.’ For example, parents can receive automated messages whenever their children leave school or step off the bus. Businesses can leave these virtual flags for interested customers at any physical location in town. As an intended recipient approaches one of these invisible flags, her mobile device reveals the contextually relevant message that was left – providing the context of time and place at every step in the journey.

Granite City Neighbors features a battery-safe technology that enables the service to run variable GPS checks while the app operates in the device background.

Granite City Neighbors enables participating businesses to launch and maintain ongoing loyalty programs. No more printing of punch cards, worrying about program expirations, or asking customers to present those punch cards while on the checkout aisle. The Community Loyalty feature allows residential consumers to automatically aggregate points for visiting participating businesses. And with businesses providing their own unique offers, loyal customers will have a chance to earn rewards as they visit on an ongoing basis.

Granite City Neighbors provides a real-time chat feature that enables all active users to engage in direct communication, which can be used by and between residents and business owners.

There’s an exciting groups feature that allows users of all types – residents, businesses, city governments and agencies, non-profit organizations, etc. – to create public or private groups. Each group contains its own bulletin board, flag and chat capability, image gallery and much more.

And then there’s Granite City Neighbors’ Community First Responder feature, which provides a vital layer of security for all community members. With a single tap, users can initiate a location-based alert to all users - dramatically increasing overall incident awareness. Community First Responder is designed to ‘crowd source’ early responders. All community members can be made immediately aware when an incident occurs, creating an opportunity for those nearby or headed in the direction of an incident to avoid the scene altogether. It also enables those nearby who may be capable of assisting to get to the scene and help out in a way that’s most appropriate.

Granite City Neighbors is for everyone: consumers, businesses and anyone else interested in experiencing the Internet in the physical world – customized specifically for their community.