1. Awesome NYC BigApps hacks

    How was your weekend? If you were at the first-ever NYC BigApps Hackathon, it was pretty amazing! A diverse group of developers, designers, and visionaries collaborated on some incredibly innovative uses of NYC Open Data and APIs from participating companies. A stellar panel of judges ranked the submissions and awarded $2,500 in prizes.

    Here’s a list of all the demoed hacks, including the winners, all coded in just under 27 hours!

    • Can I Park Here? (Grand Prize; Hackers’ Choice) — Eric Rafaloff
      Helps you decipher confusing parking regulations and cryptic signs. Just touch one button to find out whether you can park here!
    • Scene Near Me (2nd Prize) — Luis Miranda, Avi Dabir, Dan Blumberg
      Every day, New Yorkers walk the same streets as the Ghostbusters, Annie Hall, and King Kong. Scene Near Me tells you exactly where your favorite actors, directors, and superheroes stood.
    • NYC Taxi Tracker (3rd Prize; Hackers’ Choice) — Alastair Coote
      Helps you gauge the performance of taxi drivers, comparing the average time for a given route to the actual time of your journey. Users can also rate driver politeness and taxi cleanliness.
    • Did It! Do It! — Holly Chen, Mark McCorkle, Jorge Martinez, Nigel DeFreitas, Corinne Tinacci, Jeffery To
      Helps you discover things to do in NYC right now, based on real-time social intelligence.
    • Game On — Tobias Wright, Jorene Rene, Rodney Cobb
      Shows you the 532 basketball courts within the 5 boroughs so you can invite potential players for a pick-up game.
    • Street Surfer — Sean Kean, Rob Eccardt, Jeremy Baron, Arthur Grau
      A mobile browser for the physical world of places, events, and actionable data — find out where everybody’s going, meeting, doing.
    • FDNY Building Inspections Done Right — Nate Kidwell
      Allows building owners to add building characteristics to city databases. Provides QR codes and bit.ly URLs for easy updating.
    • PacManNYC — Roger Pincombe
      Play Pac-Man in NYC.
    • Fourtron — Will Charczuk, Noah Lucas
      Enriches your Foursquare history with NYC data. Checking in is only the beginning.
    • NYC Hood — Arthur Grau, Chao Huang, Harshil Shah, Noah Smith, Jay Zalowitz
       Uses NYC Open Data to give every neighborhood in the city a personality profile. Invites users to log in via Foursquare to find the best neighborhood fit.

    Check back soon for more details, and skim the @NYCBigApps tweets to soak up some of that inspiring hackathon atmosphere. Thanks to everyone who participated — now go work on your submissions for NYC BigApps 3.0!

    Follow @NYCBigApps and @ChallengePost on Twitter, and like us on Facebook. Use hashtag #NYCBigApps when you tweet.

    By Marci

    Nov 14 Comments