Mayor Bloomberg announced today the NYC BigApps competition, a contest to build the most useful software application for the city of New York. The highest prize if $5,000 and dinner with the Mayor– though substantial public recognition couldn’t hurt, either.
The newly launched NYC Big Apps site states that:
"The NYC BigApps Competition will reward the developers of the most useful, inventive, appealing, effective, and commercially viable applications for delivering information from the City of New York’s NYC.gov Data Mine to interested users."
The judges are a Who’s Who of New York City’s technology and investment leaders:
- Dawn Barber (NY Tech Meetup)
- John Borthwick (Betaworks)
- Jason Calacanis (Mahalo)
- Paul Cosgrave (NYC Department of Information Technology & Telecommunications)
- Esther Dyson, (EDVentures)
- Lawrence Lenihan, (FirstMark Capital)
- Kevin Ryan (Alley Corp.)
- Danny Schultz (DFJ Gotham Ventures)
- Fred Wilson (Union Square Ventures)
Surprising, though, is the ommission of government 2.0 pioneers Andrew Rasiej, who once ran for Comptroller on a WiFi-for-all platform, and Micah Sifry. Rasiej and Sifry founded the personal Democracy Forum.
Gavin Newsom, the Mayor of San Francisco, recently launched a similar endeavor, kicking it off on TechCrunch, the granddaddy of technology blogs.