Mr. Hauburger.

Kelly Faircloth is a guest blogger for Betabeat.

The travails of the New York City subway rider often seem endless, and while that late night map is undeniably snazzy, it’s going to take something a little more technically sophisticated to sort out the average rider’s woes.

Enter the MTA’s App Quest competition. Each of the 42 apps submitted make use of MTA data to create a better (or at least a less painful) mass transit experience. The judging criteria: quality, implementation, and potential impact. Even the runners up were promising: Free NYC Subway Location helps find the nearest station, and Notify Me NYC automatically alerts users if their usual train goes awry. Voters went for CityMaps.com, which melds real-time information from both subways and local businesses. But it was trip planner Embark NYC that took home the $5,000 grand prize.

What tipped the scales in their favor? We reached co-founder Tom Hauburger on his cell (as he attempted to board a plane), and he attributed victory to the fact that the app is still usable sans cell signal. “We made the technical investment of taking all that data the MTA provided and baking it into the application. That allows you to do all your trip routing offline.” That means you'll never find yourself underground, blindly wondering whether switching lines would save time.

The company’s founders—recent Y Combinator alums, based in the Bay Area—originally built a trip planner for San Francisco’s BART. They then decided to translate that plan to New York City, the nation’s largest transit system, and luckily the timing coincided nicely with the MTA’s contest. “We’d done a soft launch of the product back in August, and then entered the submission later, in the fall/winter time frame,” Mr. Hauburger said. Embark is also available in other cities including Boston and Philadelphia.

Of course, the trick is competing in a market that’s already got plenty of action. But Mr. Hauburger is confident in both their product and the power of the happy customer, crediting word of mouth and positive app store reviews for the success they’ve seen so far. And while users might have something else installed, “all we need is for that app to make somebody late one time, and that person’s looking for a better solution,” he said. “If they get into a situation where they’ve had a frustrating experience and they're looking for something else—we think at that point, we offer the best experience and stay on their phones.”

As for what’s next, they’ve just launched in Boston and they're also working to get their London version up-to-speed for the Olympics. From there, they’re planning their international roll-out based on transit ridership and smartphone penetration.

We have this song in our head and now so do you.

The notoriously data prudish M.T.A. may have recanted its cease-and-desist letter to app developers in favor of one of those in vogue app competitions so popular with open governments these days, but that doesn't mean the agency is giving up the good stuff.

Transit Nation reports that for the M.T.A.'s ongoing App Quest competiton (the public currently voting on 42 apps, which will be rewarded $15,000 in prizes), the M.T.A. did not expose data collected by the subway platform countdown clocks. The clocks, which report the actual time a train arrives, as opposed to the time that they're scheduled to get there, could make apps much more valuable. 

Even data like train schedules and how many riders go through the turnstiles at each station was off limit until January, 2010, when the M.T.A. buckled to pressure from developers. According to Transportation Nation, the M.T.A. doesn't seem to have a good explanation for holding back this time either:

"MTA spokesman Aaron Donovan said the authority knows the data is desirable but there’s no plan for releasing it except that “it’s on our to-do list.” An MTA staff member who didn’t want to be identified said the authority’s priority is to add more countdown clocks and put GPS devices on city buses to let riders know when the next bus will reach their stop."

Once the agency comes to its senses, Betabeat would like to request a mobile version of the countdown clock that incorporates elements of these above ground service change screens. As we exited the turnstile this morning, we saw a guy ripping down a paper sign about scheduled changes. Maybe that's why riders are always the last to know when their line is being a Grinch.