The winners built apps to help residents and tourists navigate the city. This year's competition was powered by New York's ChallengePost. “NYC BigApps continues to be a success because of the strong ecosystem of software developers, NYC residents, judges, sponsors, and the City,” said ChallengePost CEO Brandon Kessler. “We're heartened to see this competition and its successful results grow each year.”

More than 200 apps have been submitted over the three years that BigApps has been running. NYC BigApps has also snagged almost 270,000 unique visitors to its website, the city said in a press release.

On to the winners!

Roadify for iPhone

The city frequently touts its Big Apps competition as one of the highlights in its campaign to foster the local tech industry. Developers get access to all kinds of city data and the grand prize winner receives a $50,000 prize. Last year's winner was Roadify, but as Fast Company pointed out today, the app doesn't seem to be doing a great job fulfilling its mission.

The premise of Roadify is that users can find parking spots, avoid traffic jams and figure out which trains to catch. But to generate data on open parking spots and snarled traffic, its needs a critical mass of users. Betabeat downloaded the app today and fired it up. The app found zero parking spots in Manhattan and didn't seem aware of the vehicular backup growing nearby our office.

In the VC world this is referred to as the "ghost town" or "cold start" problem. When you have a service that gets better the more users it has (the always valuable "network effect"), you conversely have a service that stinks when no one is on it.

Roadify does offer a few basic perks for users, like the location of parking garages, gas stations and subway entrances. This sort of functionality is already baked in to basic services like Google Maps, but it was enough to earn Roadify a number of 5 star ratings in the Apple store.

The moral of the Fast Company story is that NY City is throwing away $50,000 a year by awarding prizes to apps without figuring out if their is a user demand that needs to be met. But the winner from the first year of Big Apps, MyCityWay, scored a $5 million series A round this year and has racked up over 1 million downloads. When it comes to investing in early stage startups, batting .500 is considered a great average.

This is a guest post from Steven Romalewski who blogs at Spaciality. Mr. Romalewski directs the CUNY Mapping Service at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY).  A theme throughout his work over the past 20 years has been public access to data - identifying, obtaining, analyzing, and providing widespread access to data sets that help people understand their local environments. He has previously blogged about New York City's OpenData initiative here.

@nycgov posted a tweet on Friday touting the map of WiFi hotspots on the new NYC OpenData site.  I was impressed the city was trying to get the word out about some of the interesting data sets they’ve made public. It was retweeted, blogged about, etc many many times over during the day.

The map is nice (with little wifi symbols  marking the location of each hotspot).  And it certainly seems to show that there are lots of hotspots throughout the city, especially in Manhattan.

But when I took a close look, I was less than impressed.  Here’s why:

• No metadata. The NYC Socrata site has zero information on who created the data, why it was created, when it was created, source(s) for the wifi hotspots, etc.  So if I wanted to use this data in an app, or for analysis, or just to repost on my own website, I’d have no way of confirming the validity of the data or whether it met my needs.  Not very good for a site that’s supposed to be promoting transparency in government.
• No contact info. The wifi data profile says that “Cam Caldwell” created the data on Oct. 7, 2011 and uploaded it Oct 10.  But who is Cam?  Does this person work for a city agency?  It says the data was provided by DoITT, but does Cam work at DoITT?
  • If I click the “Contact Data Owner” link I just get a generic message form.  I used the “Contact Data Owner” link for a different data set last week, and still haven’t heard back.  Not even confirmation that my message was received, let alone who received it.  Doesn’t really inspire confidence that I can reach out to someone who knows about the data in order to ask questions about the wifi locations.
• No links for more information. The “About” page provides a couple of links that seem like they might describe the data, but they don’t.
  • For example, this link tells me about the web map service that I can use to display the map on my own site, but doesn’t provide any meaningful information about the actual data themselves.

If I were to use the wifi data for a media story, or to analyze whether my Community Board has more or less hotspots than other Boards, or if I wanted to know if the number of hotspots in my area has changed over time, the NYC Socrata site isn’t helpful.

Even looking at the map on its own, it’s not very helpful.  Without knowing if the list of hotspots is comprehensive (does it include the latest hotspots in NYC parks? does it include the new hotspots at MTA subway stations? etc) or up to date (the Socrata site says the list of wifi sites is “updated as needed” – what does that mean?), I have zero confidence in using the data beyond just a pretty picture.

I’m sure if I clicked the “Contact Data Owner” link, eventually I’d get answers to these questions. But that’s not the point.  The point is that the new NYC OpenData site bills itself as a platform to facilitate how “public information can be used in meaningful ways.”  But if the wifi data is any guide, the OpenData site makes it almost impossible to meaningfully do anything with the data.

The wifi data is another example of how I think NYC’s implementation of the new Socrata platform is a step backwards.  Other NYC websites that provide access to public data — the City Planning Department’s Bytes of the Big Apple site as well as agency-specific sites from Finance, Buildings, HPD, and others — all provide detailed metadata, data “dictionaries”, and other descriptive information about available data files.  This contextual and descriptive information actually makes these data sets useful and meaningful, inviting the public to become informed consumers and repurposers of the city’s data.

The Socrata platform, in and of itself, seems great.  But NYC hasn’t done a very good job at all of putting it to use.  #opendata #fail

Ms. Sterne

This morning, the NYC Digital Tumblr featured a big, bold link to NYC Open Data, advertising a catalog that "offers access to a repository of government-produced, machine-readable data sets." Given the city's penchant for exposing this data, we wondered if this catalog was new.

"It is new - it's a big deal for us," replied the city's chief digital officer Rachel Sterne. "First time we have API- enabled data, which has long been a goal."

In response to the announcement, entrepreneur and investor Mark Birch wrote, "The age of open sourcing government is upon us and it starts with open access to data."

This catalog sounds like the same initiative Ms. Sterne mentioned in a recent interview with O'Reilly Media discussing the vision for "city as a platform" and how open open government could transform New York.

Sterne highlighted the most important open data initiative that the city has pursued to date, the NYC DataMine. Soon, she said, they will be introducing "NYC Platform," which she described as "the city's API." All of their work opening the data, however, "doesn't matter if we're not evangelizing it and making sure people are using it."

Good thing Mayor Bloomberg launched the  Big Apps 3.0 contest during his surprise NYTM visit last night. That guarantees the API at least some action. But it's time to get handsy with the data, guys.

In March, Zagat's head of mobile headed to WeWork lab's Consmr and just yesterday, Steve Rowe, its chief revenue officer jumped ship, for local start-up MyCityWay, reports Business Insider. For MyCityWay, the message is clear: time to make the paper. The start-up, which won NYC's inaugural Big Apps contest, lets users navigate cities with references guides for everything from food, to rents, to traffic. It's picked up more than 3.5 million activations since launching in 2009.

Zagat's is no stranger to the tech scene. Tim and Nina Zagat made no. 25 on the Silicon Alley Reporter's List a decade ago for the "fairly new-to-Net Zagat.com" that "creamed the cyber-only competition." Seems like they need to step their game up again if they hope to keep their talent.

Not to fear fine citizens, the city has a contest for you. Big Ideas let New Yorkers submit their ideas for what mobile and desktop apps would most improve NYC. The winner took home $100 in cold cash.

“As expected, the Ideas Challenge has built upon the success of BigApps and demonstrated the tremendous amount of talent and innovative thinking that exists among developers and non-developers here in New York City,” said Seth W. Pinsky, President of the New York City Economic Development Corporation. “This competition has given a voice to New Yorkers with creative ideas on how to improve their city, but who don’t necessarily have the technical capabilities to create an app themselves. These winning ideas will now help shape the future of web, desktop or mobile apps, and, most importantly, will benefit the lives of New Yorkers across the five boroughs. I congratulate all the winners on this terrific achievement.”

And your winners are: 

·         Let you 'like' or rate any street or block in the five boroughs (Carlos J. Gomez de Llarena)

·         Create networks of citizens who can chime in about their borough, district and neighborhood issues with local government (Carlos J. Gomez de Llarena)

·         Provide an open API to all MTA transit information, schedules, delays, and current locations of trains and buses (Kyri Sarantakos)

·         Aggregate bike accident data to make/help petition for safer bike routes (Trev Eld)

·         Allow residents to rate their building's owner, management co., landlord, even brokers and lets interested renters browse those ratings (Bud Caddell)

·         Aggregate all the volunteer initiatives available, its cause and allows someone to register/participate (Christopher Bian)

·         Tell someone when the next subway car is to arrive at their station, before they go underground (Stephen Mellert)

·         Has a visual, color coded map of all street parking rules, regulations and street cleaning schedules (Will Turnage)

·         For each borough gives the location of nearest public restrooms with A, B, C, D type ratings for their cleanliness and the level of safety (Sheryl Commodore)

·         Tells someone their options during an emergency based on where they are and what their status is (Kelly Thompson)

Personally Betabeat would kill for a very accurate subway arrival predictor and a drop dead simple way to avoid parking tickets. An app that helps us find a parking spot wouldn't be to shabby either.

Think you've got the chops to build one of these apps? The raw data is ready and waiting.

Image via Barbara Haddock Taylor, Baltimore Sun

Here's a little anecdote to get the day started. Some dudes in Balitmore with a parking app and a panda for their mascot totally left that town and headed to the Big Apple when they landed a spot in the innagural ER Accelerator.

For anyone who's been paying attention, New York is throwing a sort of start-up summer camp this year, with half a dozen accelerators and incubators putting young start-ups through the paces. The L.A. Times, which doesn't even mention ER by name, seems blown away by the idea of a company getting $25,000 and a spot in Times Square.

"Baltimore might have had its own private accelerator in place this summer — Miller and Zilberbaum applied for it — but organizers couldn't pull together the necessary funding," that article intones.

In the last year three accelerator programs, Entrepreneurs Roundtable, DreamIt and Techstars, which was ranked as the #1 program in the nation by the Kauffman foundation, have all launched in NYC. HackNY, Big Apps and Founder Labs are also in the mix. The result is a critical mass where start-ups are drawn to the city even when they fail to win a coveted spot, knowing that a new opportunity might open up soon.

Feeling confused? Not to worry, Betabeat has created a handy guide to picking the right accelerator for your start-up.

Of course, Panda Parking might be equally interested in New York's other natural resource, tons and tons of cars, very limited space and alternate side rules that can only be deciphered by a smartphone.