Santa Monica resident Dan Estes develops mobile apps as a hobby and he just created one that turns users into activists against water waste.

Users who have downloaded Estes’ free DroughtShame app for iOS devices have been taking photos of examples of water being wasted, and using the app to rate the waste and add captions. The app adds the address of the photo and then uploads everything anonymously to a server.

Once Estes gets enough users and photos, he plans to offer the records to cities where there’s been a lot of water waste as an ongoing paid subscription service to cover the cost of storing the information.

“Like anyone else in Los Angeles, I see the water news and how reservoirs have dropped,” said Estes, a commercial real estate broker for Jones Lang LaSalle Inc. “It’s just scary as an Angeleno to think that’s happened over the last five to six years, and to think about what’s going to happen over the next five to six years.”

The most egregious example of water waste he’s seen so far? Six sprinklers watering a small, 150-square-foot patch of pristine, green lawn.

“The sprinklers were spraying water eight feet in the air and it was heinous,” Estes said. “In my app’s next version, that is the background.”

Charity on Wheels

Anthony Marguleas, 49-year-old founder of Pacific Palisades real estate firm Amalfi Estates, has made donating to charity part of his business: He gives 10 percent of the net proceeds of his commissions on each property he sells to a charity of his client’s choice. But when he started doing some boots-on-the-ground volunteering, delivering food to neighborhood houses enrolled in the Meals on Wheels program, he discovered how tricky it can be.

On his first day as a volunteer, Marguleas was given a list of about 10 houses that needed deliveries, along with the dietary restrictions for each. The very first delivery was to a diabetic, so he had to swap out the Jell-O dessert for an alternative without sugar. When driving away from what he thought was his first good deed done that day, Marguleas realized he had given the person the wrong lunch sack.

“Luckily, we were two blocks away so we spun around, and luckily I came back before they could try the meal, but we definitely messed the first meal up,” he said.