This app was led in part by an LA journalist and lover of Malibu beaches, Jenny Price. She had been reporting on these public beaches in a series that ran on laobserved.com, a popular LA blog.
Here's the first such piece, which I notice ran in 2006:
Since this is HN, I was trying to point out that it's a case where latent knowledge was transformed into highly useful software.
I do pretty much assume the app wasn't totally her idea. This is because I've been aware of her work (e.g., http://west.stanford.edu/node/901) for probably 10 years now, but hey, I could be wrong. The agency that developed the app is here: http://escapeapps.com/about
Here's the first such piece, which I notice ran in 2006:
http://www.laobserved.com/intell/2006/08/guide_to_malibus_hi...
Here's a link to the announcement of the kickstarter campaign:
http://www.laobserved.com/archive/2013/05/time_ticking_for_j...
which contains pointers to some of her other articles.
It was a genius idea on someone's part to get her to build an app around this knowledge. She's a journalist, not a computer nerd.