NY Times Winter Olympics Venue 3D map & 2010 FedUC

NY Times Winter Olympics Venue 3D map

and James Fee's 'Reflections on the 2010 ESRI FedUC'

Most importantly from the FedUC, ESRI is partnering with Amazon web services.

Olympic Medal Count

My grad alma mata Univ. Buffalo's GIS/Remote Sensing work in Haiti

My grad advisor Dr. Renschler and his student's work:

Brooklyn Boondoggle Film about Atlantic Yards

Brooklyn Boondoggle from meerkatmedia.org on Vimeo.

NYC BigApps

NYC's opening up of municipal data for application developers is totally awesome.

I want to use the term 'crowdsourcing' for this but it may not be totally appropriate. But it really supports the idea that open government is good and that perhaps the greatest ideas for municipal (or municipal-like) applications do not come from above, as in government bureaucracy, but from the public; applications by people using public data for other people, outside of the normal government's political freak-show.

From NY Times Bits:

The winners of the first NYC BigApps competition, which invited the public to develop applications using raw sets of municipal data, were announced at an event in New York on Thursday evening.

The competition, which the city’s Economic Development Corporation kicked off in June, gave software developers access to more than 170 sets of data from 30 city agencies, including weekly traffic updates, schedules of citywide events, property sales, results of restaurant inspections and mappable data around school and voting districts.

A panel of judges, which included John Borthwick, chief executive of Betaworks, and Fred Wilson, a partner at Union Square Ventures, selected 10 winners from a pool of more than 100 entries. Cash prizes totaling $20,000 will be shared among the winning teams, and they will also be invited to a dinner with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.

The top three winners were:

WayFinder NYC: An application designed for smartphones powered by Google’s Android operating system allows users to find the closest subway entrance. It uses an approach known as augmented reality, overlaying subway line symbols on a live view through the phone’s camera.

Taxihack: Like Yelp for cabs, this Web tool allows people to post comments on individual taxis and their drivers via e-mail or Twitter.

Big Apple Ed: This Web-based guide offers detailed profiles, reviews and information about the city’s network of public schools.

An iPhone application called NYC Way that offers a range of information for city residents and visitors, took home the “Popular Choice” award, determined by an online vote.

As my colleague Claire Cain Miller reported earlier, New York isn’t the only city hoping to tap into local talent and encourage city-specific app development. San Francisco and Washington are also trying to figure out how to use the Internet and smartphones to make government data more accessible.