Tonight at the IAC headquarters building in NYC, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced the winners of the Big Apps competition. Below is a list of the winners. We covered the Big Apps competition extensively here on CN so you may already be familiar with the winners. Congrats to the winners and to all of the developers who participated. It was simply awesome to see all of the creative ideas using the city’s data feeds.

Best Overall Application:

• Grand Prize: WayFinder NYC – an application that allows users to find the nearest and best directions to New York City subway and New Jersey PATH stations on Android phones. It was also selected as the Grand Prize winner for the “Data Visualization Award.” Team members: Victor Sima and Steven Lao.
• Second Prize: Taxihack – an application that allows users to post live comments on New York City taxis and their drivers via email (alert@taxihack.com) or Twitter (@taxihack). Users send messages to the system, which are then posted on the appropriate pages for public viewing. Team members: Randy Meech and Sam Cole.
• Third Prize: Big Apple Ed – an education application that provide residents with an easy-to-use guide to schools in the City, including school searches, top ten lists, analyses, comparison charts, and detailed school profiles. Team members: Adda Birnir, Jonathan Soma, and Kate Reyes.
• Five Honorable Mentions were also awarded for Best Overall Application including: Actuatr, UpNext 3D NYC, Trees Near You, PushPin Web, and NYC Way.

Investor’s Choice Award for the application with the highest potential for commercialization:

• NYC Way – an iPhone application that bundles more than 30 New York City resources and provides information sorted by the user’s current location. NYC Way was also selected as the “Popular Choice Award” Grand Prize winner. Team members: Puneet Mehta, Archana Patchirajan, Sonpreet Bhatia, Arun Arunachalam, Vivek Mehta, and Shariq Siddiqui.

Data Visualization Award for the most visually appealing and user-friendly application:

• WayFinder NYC

Popular Choice Awards:

• Grand Prize: NYC Way
• Second Prize: Bookzee – a library book search application that allows users to enter a book title or author to find the nearest library currently holding it. Team members: Mike Cavaliere, Veronica De la Pena, Timothy Murry, Michael Boski, Will Schenk, and Fernando Guillen.

City Talent Award for employees of the City, the New York City Economic Development Corporation or their families:

• New York Parks and Recreation Online (NYCPRO) – an application that allows users to search for parks and recreational opportunities in New York City by neighborhood and by certain recreational activities. It can also be used to locate bike shops, restaurants, hospitals, landmarks, and multi-use trails.

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We covered the launch of the Big Apps competition here in NYC back in October. The voting opened this week for the “popular choice” and each day we will take a look at one category. Today’s category (and the last category) is “Living in NYC”. Remember you are only allowed one vote across all categories so make sure to look at all the apps before casting your vote.

• 311 Service Calls and Restaurant Inspections by Your Mapper – Find the closest restaurants inspection results and service calls to your home or office on interactive maps.   Browse through all the locations (22,000 restaurants and 39,000 service calls) going back through January 2008, and subscribe to RSS feeds for updates.
• Analysis of District Data on an Interactive Map – An easy and interactive way to browse data about NYC districts, seeing the results on a map.
• AntiBullyingColor – Bullying hurts our most vulnerable citizens: children and adolescents. Their often-prolonged mistreatment poisons the wellbeing of our communities.   Color as a symbol is a simple metaphor. We color our feelings.
• Business Improvement District Relationship Management – BIDRM is a community resource portal which provides business solutions for Business Improvement District managers and advocates. Unlike traditional management suites, BIDRM provides innovative Internet-based tools that are easily accessible from any location.
• Big Apple Ed – Finding a school in New York City is hard. We’re here to help! We have a school search, top ten lists, charming analyses, comparison charts and detailed school profiles to help you every step of the way.
• Blocks And Lots – Blocks And Lots provides easy access to NYC’s property records enabling you to incorporate detailed property information into all kinds of web and mobile sites and apps. Blocks And Lots is more than 5 million NYC property records.
• Bookzee – Bookzee is a location-based library book search. Go to bookzee.net on your desktop or mobile browser, enter a book title or author, and Bookzee will find a library near you that has it.
• BuildingBeat – BldgBeat is a social platform for urban development. Monitor construction activity, start a discussion around a building and participate in designing your ideal city. Engage in urbanism.
• come play now NYC! – Comeplaynow.com looks to serve as a social networking site connecting millions of athletes, right here in New York City.  The city spends millions of dollars maintaining thousands of parks and recreational facilities.
• Dataturf – Dataturf is an online tool that helps people compare different addresses and their neighborhoods when searching for a place to live.  Dataturf gives each address a score based on the proximity and density of attractions that surround it.
• Department of Numbers: New York City Home Prices and Affordability – The Department of Numbers: New York City Home Prices and Affordability site uses New York City home sales records along with city and borough median household income data to calculate monthly home and apartment median sales prices and estimate the fraction of homes sold that would be affordable for median income households. 
• Govbe – Govbe enables constituents and elected officials to connect with eachother. It also enables constituents to connect with others in the same area and their local officials through their zip code, town, county, and state.
• Graffiti: Awareness, Administration, Appreciation – graffiti.fanz.in/new-york is a tool that visually maps locations of graffiti around New York City and integrates 3D street views, user photos and videos for each incident.  The application allows users to report an incident of graffiti and upload related video.
• MyPrecinct: New York City – MyPrecinct: New York City provides heat maps of the precincts of NYC. Users can view heat maps of crime, fire and medical alarm box availability as well as pinpoint locations of items such as alarm boxes(with response times) and parking facilities by searching their own precinct.
• NYC Area Link – NYC Area Link is a mobile guide for New York City residents that provides quick access to neighborhood and citywide services. The application presents an aggregated list of service locations (e.g. libraries, police stations, parks) available to inhabitants of a particular area.
• NYC BigMaps – NYC BigMaps provides interactive maps, heatmaps, and mobile applications for New York City. Interactive maps Choose a center address and see the nearest restaurants and 311 calls to you.
• NYC Broken Meters – NYC Broken Meters iPhone app brings you,  for the first time, a location based, map view of all broken meters in Manhattan and the five boroughs, based on Scout/311 broken parking meter data set. The data set is refreshed when new data becomes available.
• NYC Community Mixer – The NYC Community Mixer combines various data sets from the NYC.gov Data Mine and displays them in the form of a heat map of New York City broken down by community districts.  Users can combine multiple categories of data to generate the map using a mixer-like control.
• NYC Crime Stoppers Explorer - Interactively explore NYC’s ‘Most Wanted’ and ‘Bank Robbery’ suspects. Review individuals with cover flow navigation and dynamic map. Information is updated real-time through data feeds from the NYC Police Department.
• NYC Graffiti Snapshot - This application helps users explore graffiti trends in New York City.  It animates the growth of graffiti incidents over time on custom maps of New York City. The application is primarily focused on visualizing graffiti data.
• NYC Health and Demographics – Users can compare results from the Community Health Survey with demographic information from the 2000 US Census on a map.  Data is shown as a thematic map (coloured polygons), using Google Maps as a base.
• NYC Traffic Updates – Ever want to know about NYC lane and street closures in real time?  There’s an app for that. Via an RSS feed, the City of New York Department of Transportation issues traffic alerts for road construction and events where lane and street closings will affect the flow of traffic.
• NYCMapExplorer - NYCMapExplorer is a map exploration tool that allows users to quickly compare multiple data sets against one another. Because the comparisons occur on a single plane, data trends can be discovered and explored with ease.
• ParkShark – ParkShark is a parking space sharing app.  It allows uses to share spots and search and reserve other user’s shared spots.  It also offers users the ability to search for other types of parking such as public and private parking lots.
• PrimoSpot – PrimoSpot provides a service to the public to help them park more efficiently in crowded metropolitan areas.  Using this service, we hope people will spend less time driving around looking for a parking spot, using less gas and helping the environment in the process.
• PublicSway – We are a New York City-based non-governmental organization that promotes transparent and measurable communication between citizens and local public officials to effect change in the community. Our application keeps citizens informed about issues and events in their neighborhood.
• RentSleuth – RentSleuth allows users to view detailed heatmaps of every NYC neighborhood. These maps show hotspots for crime, graffiti, potholes, trash, sewer complaints, and more. Users may also view subway coverage by neighborhood, as well as bedbug reports.
• Roadify – Roadify is a community-powered platform that will improve the daily commute for many New Yorkers. Roadify utilizes the power of text messaging and Twitter (with more platforms soon) to connect travelers in an upstream/downstream fashion that saves everyone time and minimizes traffic.
• smartPark – smartPark’s functionality smartPark is an Android based mobile application that takes the frustration and delay out of parking in NYC by: Locating nearby street parking that will soon be vacant Locating nearby parking garages and comparing them based on hourly/daily rates.
• Snap 311 – Snap 311 endeavors to make reporting problems to New York City as easy as possible. Just snap a picture with your mobile device, and email it to us.
• TownBug.com NYC -  TownBug.com “The Internet Just Came Home” Internet giants (Google, Twitter, Flickr, Craigslist, YouTube, etc), together for the first time on one page – tweaked and massaged  to serve every local community.
• Uncover Your City – We wanted to create a tool that took all the information from the NYC data mine and allowed New Yorkers to compare how their neighborhood compared with others. This allows people to see their neighborhoods in new ways and explore their city.

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We covered the launch of the Big Apps competition here in NYC back in October. The voting opened this week for the “popular choice” and each day we will take a look at one category. Today’s category is “Exploring NYC“. Remember you are only allowed one vote across all categories so make sure to look at all the apps before casting your vote.

Update: There were two apps I left off this list yesterday. They were created by city workers and aren’t able to win the popular choice prizes but will compete for the “City Talent Award”. I apologize for my mistake in not including them originally.

•  Look into NYC – Combine pertinent data on public and private establishments and/or facilities coming from different NYC agencies into an easy to search web interface.
• New York City Parks and Recreation Online – Overview New York City Parks and Recreation Online (NYCPRO) is a web application that lets you discover parks and recreational opportunities in New York City. You can search for parks by neighborhood, as well as limit your search to certain recreational activities.

Here are the other Exploring NYC apps that can be voted on for the popular choice prizes.

• Digital Boroughs by Geocommons – This application represents various data from the NYC Data Mine in an online atlas. It draws on NASA, Yahoo, Microsoft, Google and OpenStreetMaps tiles as base maps. The data is exportable to various formats including: Google Earth KML, CSV, ESRI Shapefile, JSON, and Spatialite.
• Find My Library – Find My Library is an open source software project with the goal of making it easier for patrons – particularly those with limited access to the Internet from home – to locate a public library in their community.
• Hey Walkies - Make no bones about it, New Yorker’s love their dogs. You’d be hard pressed to walk a block without bumping into a Frenchie, Jack Russell or Labrador hotfooting it to the local doggy park. And it’s not just the pups that are loving their doggy park experience.
• History Bus M22 – History Bus M22 App uses GPS technology to aid NYC tourists and residents in exploring the 22 historic houses in NYC. Using the iPhones built in GPS, the default setting on the App would pinpoint NYC’s 22 historic houses.
• iParks NY, Midtown – Like many New Yorkers we make ample use of the City’s wonderful parks.  Some are great for kids, some are great for adults, there are literally dozens of sites to see in Central Park alone and thousands in the five boroughs at large.
• NY Nyx – New York City. The Big Apple. The City that never sleeps. So much to do and so little time. We can’t help you with your eternal to-do list, but we can help you save some time.
• NYC Greenmarkets – iPhone-based Mobile Guide to Greenmarkets, Farmers, CSAs and Seasonal Produce in New York City Project History: The idea for a “mobile/smartphone guide to all things green and sustainable” is not new.
• NYC Landmarks – NYC Landmarks makes it easy for city residents and visitors to explore the incredible collection of historic districts and individual landmarks in each of the five boroughs. Photographs of each landmark are extracted from Landmark Preservation Commission designation reports.
• NYC Park Events Map – This interactive map lets users learn about New York City’s park events in a new, innovative way.
• NYC Treasure Finder – In city where you can walk around the street and pick up some amazing goods others are just throwing away, there isn’t a centralized place where people can find where, what and when trash and recylables are being collected.
• NYC Way: 30+ NYC iPhone Apps in One – NYC Way is an iPhone application that bundles a variety of NYC resources useful for locals and tourists alike. Experience the power of 30+ NYC related iPhone apps packaged into one. NYC Way is location aware and provides you with information sorted by proximity.
• NYC.ByCycle.info - NYC.ByCycle.info allows users to locate the nearest bike racks to their current detected location or a specified address. Bikers can save time and ensure their bike’s safety by using this tool.
• NYCSamosa - 1. Provide access to City Data via simple mobile Text-Messaging interface. 2. Emphasize ease of use so that requests for data can be made using Natural Language (Ex: “show me interesting events on Tuesday”) 3.  Provide feedback mechanism (much like 311 iPhone App) so that users can report on problems to the city (ex: “Fallen Tree on Broadway and 63rd Street”). This data is saved and can be made available to the City Agencies for use.
• Open Accessible Space Information System – The Open Accessible Space Information System (OASIS) mapping website helps sustain New York City’s open spaces and visualize the nexus between community greening and broader urban planning issues.  It is a richly layered mashup of data from the city, state, and federal government and environmental and community organizations.
• PlayaroundNYC – PlayaroundNYC was created to help New Yorkers see how well their neighborhoods are supported by playgrounds.  It uses walking distance to playgrounds and pollution caused by nearby truck routes to generate an overview of how well different areas of New York City are supported by playgrounds.
• Playground Explorer – An easy way to find local playgrounds, leave comments and rate your favorite playgrounds in nyc.
• Ride the City – Ride the City helps bicyclists find safe bike routes in major cities. Like MapQuest, Google Maps, and other mapping applications, Ride the City finds the shortest distance between two points, with a difference.
• Spokes NYC – Spokes NYC is a free iPhone application for New York City cyclists.  It generates ideal bike routes with turn by turn directions for cyclists within city limits.  Other features include a bike rack locator, bike shop locator, and the ability to report thefts from a given bike rack.
• TAPP NYC – TAPP NYC was conceived and built by 10x Studio in New York City in response to the NYC BigApps competition. New York City has released over a hundred tables of city data for public use — the Datamine. Some of it is banal, some is interesting.
• Taxihack – Taxihack allows users to post live comments on NYC taxis and their drivers via email (alert@taxihack.com) or Twitter (@taxihack). Users send messages to the system, including either the medallion number (like 1A23) or the driver’s number (located on the driver’s id visible in the backseat).
• Trees Near You – Trees Near You (a.k.a. TreesNY) is an iPhone application that helps you learn about more than 500,000 trees that live on New York City sidewalks. For any area of the city, from block to borough, you can see the different species that live there, and calculate the environmental (and monetary!) benefits that these trees provide.
• UpNext 3D NYC – UpNext NYC is an interactive 3D map for exploring and discovering the city on your iPhone.  Experience the Big Apple in full 3D on your phone to quickly and easily find all that the city has to offer.
• Walkshed NYC – Walkshed NY uses 10 data collections drawn from the NYC.gov Data Mine to enable users to create a walkabilty heat map based on individual preferences.
• WayFinder NYC – Find the nearest and best directions to New York City subway and NJ Path stations on your Android phone. Way to go! Wayfinder, NYC’s augmented reality app, is designed to help you locate the subway and PATH stations nearest you.
• Where Brooklyn App – Leveraging the NYC DataMine for Brooklyn points of interest, we have created an application that allows users to tour Brooklyn via Augmented Reality. Through the use of location-based information, users can not only find out relevant points of interest near them, but also share them with their friends over Twitter, Facebook, and Foursquare—thus enabling them to make the simple task of visiting Brooklyn into a social event.

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We covered the launch of the Big Apps competition here in NYC back in October. The voting opened this week for the “popular choice” and each day we will take a look at one category. Today’s category is “Events“. Remember you are only allowed one vote across all categories so make sure to look at all the apps before casting your vote.

• BigMapple – BigMapple places NYC public and cultural events on an interactive map that uses data from Twitter and Flickr to show users what people are doing and saying throughout NYC.
• Localnext – LocalNext provides an intuitive way for New Yorkers to find the city’s latest and greatest events filtered by location, category, and timeframe. Use our interactive map tool and unique time slider to navigate across the city in the time and date you want.
• Make My Day – Have you ever felt overwhelmed by the number of things you can do in NYC? Or have you felt like you’ve seen it all?  Make My Day is an application that helps local residents and tourists experience all that this city has to offer by introducing an element of adventure and excitement into their schedule.
• NYC Events: Parks, Art and Music – A listing for each category is shown and after selecting an event, you will see additional details, including a map and the ability to send the event info to a friend (via email or text msg) as well as the ability to add the event to your calendar.
• Pop To It – Pop To It allows you to quickly and efficiently find an event that interests you by providing a unique user interface based on treemaps.

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We covered the launch of the Big Apps competition here in NYC back in October. The voting opened this week for the “popular choice” and each day we will take a look at one category. Today’s category is “Developer Tools“. Remember you are only allowed one vote across all categories so make sure to look at all the apps before casting your vote.

• Actuatr – Actuatr is a platform that simplifies opening up data to developers. In one step, anyone can upload their data and immediately get a simple API with auto-generated documentation ready for developers to use for building innovative applications for the web or mobile devices.
• PushpinWeb – PushpinWeb provides a platform for public data to thrive.  Developers and everyday citizens can not only explore detailed data about any location in New York City, but can also use Processing-driven visualizations to power high-level understanding.
• Remarkable – Remarkable is a different kind of public feedback system, built for the NYC.gov Data Mine. The goal of this application is to organize and prioritize feedback in a way that is easily digestable for the decision-makers behind the data, improving the data we get.
• simpler/gov - Simpler/gov is a platform that connects people and data. Simpler/gov lets you interact with state and local government data on the web. The data is alive and active; you can ask multiple questions, get results instantly (in seconds), and then ask again.

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We covered the launch of the Big Apps competition here in NYC back in October. The voting opened this week for the “popular choice” and each day we will take a look at one category. Today’s category is “Politics“. Remember you are only allowed one vote across all categories so make sure to look at all the apps before casting your vote.

• Nexttown – Nexttown lets you see in seconds who represents you and what they are doing for your community.  It also makes it easy to explore the city’s political landscape.
• OMB Executive Dashboard – Graphical display of New York City’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for over 80 City agencies and covered organizations such as the Transit Authority, Health and Hospitals Corporation and the Housing Authority.
• PrecinctsReporting NYC – PrecinctsReporting NYC is an interactive tool for mapping historical election results in New York City block-by-block. The tool includes most contested city and state races since 2005, including the 2009 mayoral race.
• PrimoSpot – PrimoSpot provides a service to the public to help them park more efficiently in crowded metropolitan areas.  Using this service, we hope people will spend less time driving around looking for a parking spot, using less gas and helping the environment in the process. (I’m thinking this one is mis-categorized)
• SMS Congressional District Lookup – The Mobile Congressional District Lookup application lets people lookup their congressional district and representatives using text messaging. To use it, take out your mobile phone and text the word DISTRICT to the number 30644.
• Who Represents Me? – By clicking on a point, a user can all of the legislative and head executive officials representing that location, including their city council member, state assembly member, state senator,governor, US  representative, US senators, and president.

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We covered the launch of the Big Apps competition here in NYC back in October. The voting opened this week for the “popular choice” and each day we will take a look at one category. Today’s category is “Eating in NYC“. Remember you are only allowed one vote across all categories so make sure to look at all the apps before casting your vote. It looks like a lot of developers want to find a clean place to eat.

• Eat Clean.ly – Eat Clean.ly helps locate restaurants near you based on location, food type, and NYC inspection results.
• Food Inspectr – a simple iPhone optimized webpage that allows people to check and see if the restraunt they are at has violated any health codes.
• Ick City – Make the information provided by the City of New York Restaurant Inspections readily available and easily accessible.
• NYC BigApple Reporter – BigApple Reporter is a free personal photography application and web service that connects your iPhone to several Reporting Services that improve the quality of life for your family and your community.
• NYC Restaurant Scrutinizer – NYC Restaurant Scrutinizer provides an up-to-date breakdown of every NYC restaurant inspection result. Its simple, easy-to-use interface, puts roughly 19 thousand pages of essential information at your fingertip.
• NYC-Eats – NYC-Eats is a mobile restaurant search app which uses the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene’s Restaurant Inspection Information to help consumers locate nearby restaurants.
• Restaurant inspection results – This web application displays the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene Restaurant Inspection Results. 
• Soup Fly - Soup Fly lets you lookup New York City restaurant inspection scores by restaurant name or any location and view the scores along with maps/directions, menus, reviews, reservations, and online ordering.
• SporkNYC – SporkNYC views and locates restaurant health code violations using restaurant inspection data from the NYC DataMine.
• The NYC Daily Spoonful - This spatial visualization walks users through the daily ebbs and flows of food inspections in NYC. Users interact with a dynamic map and calendar to investigate violations in detail.
• You Are Where You Eat – This app which is written for the GPhone allows you to find restaurants with violations based on NYC Department of Health Data. By pressing on the map provided, icons will appear indicating establishments with food violations.
• Z Drinks – Using the Neighborhood Names GIS, the user is able to find food/drinks specials throughout the city based on neighborhood. The user is able to see the results in both a list view as-well-as populated on a map.

Leave your thoughts on the above apps in the comments and if you decided to place your vote for one of them.

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We covered the launch of the Big Apps competition here in NYC back in October. Today the voting has opened for the “popular choice” which will award two of the apps with cash prizes and a dinner with Mayor Michael Bloomberg. There are other cash awards which will be judged by the panel selected by contest administrator ChallengePost which is made up of their investors and other NYC venture capitalists. I am unsure if an app can win a popular choice prize and a judge-selected prize.

We provided a random list of ten of the apps this past weekend.  Gothamist noted that the broken meters app is their favorite so far. There really is nothing as awesome like seeing a broken meter FAIL sign.

Over the next week or so we will highlight all of the submitted applications in groups. The categories include events, living in NYC (largest category), developer tools, exploring NYC and eating in NYC.

Please go ahead and vote for your favorites and leave a comment with the apps you liked the best. The developers created the apps for free and need your support. You don’t need to be located in NYC to vote and you’ve got until January 7, 2010 to select your favorite.

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We covered the launch of the Big Apps competition here in NYC back in October. Mayor Bloomberg noted, “…encourage talented application developers to create innovative online and mobile applications to serve New York City residents, businesses, and visitors.”

The entry period has closed and I thought it would be interesting to highlight 10 of the apps that were submitted. The entire list of submitted applications is available to peruse as well. I selected the 10 apps below completely at random — these are NOT the only finalists. One of the important aspects to remember when you visit one of the Big Apps entries is that the data that is displayed was provided by the city. What this means is that the app (should) be showing everything that meets your desired criteria — but only to the point that the data was provided to the developer. There is a nice variety of apps and some pretty creative ideas!

Update: the voting period has started – check out our post with a link to all of the entrants you can vote from.

	SporkNYC From developer: SporkNYC views and locates restaurant health code violations using restaurant inspection data from the NYC DataMine.My quick take: Very quick to respond and I like the spork-rating guide. I did find that if you do a search for a chain (i.e. McDonalds), only 3 results were found. It’s hard for me to imagine that all of the other McDonalds locations in NYC are perfect on inspections. This goes to what I noted above regarding the data provided to the developer
	Who Represents Me? From developer: Who Represents Me? — By clicking on a point, a user can all of the legislative and head executive officials representing that location, including their city council member, state assembly member, state senator,governor, US representative, US senators, and president. In addition, the site provides links to the borough, state, and country’s Web pages.My quick take: Works very well and displays not only the people representing the absolute location but everyone up the chain in the state. The site could use a stylesheet to make the data display a bit more attractive.
	NYC Broken Meters From developer: NYC Broken Meters iPhone app brings you, for the first time, a location based, map view of all broken meters in Manhattan and the five boroughs, based on Scout/311 broken parking meter data set. The data set is refreshed when new data becomes available.My quick take: There’s nothing like parking in a spot and finding the big FAIL on the meter – it’s like finding gold. I wish this app worked on more than just the iPhone but it’s a great start.
	Spokes NYC From developer: Spokes NYC is a free iPhone application for New York City cyclists. It generates ideal bike routes with turn by turn directions for cyclists within city limits. Other features include a bike rack locator, bike shop locator, and the ability to report thefts from a given bike rack.My quick take: I wish I rode a bike!
	Trees Near You From developer: Trees Near You (a.k.a. TreesNY) is an iPhone application that helps you learn about more than 500,000 trees that live on New York City sidewalks. For any area of the city, from block to borough, you can see the different species that live there, and calculate the environmental (and monetary!) benefits that these trees provide.My quick take: There are trees in NYC?
	Taxihack From developer: Taxihack allows users to post live comments on NYC taxis and their drivers via email (alert@taxihack.com) or Twitter (@taxihack). Users send messages to the system, including either the medallion number (like 1A23) or the driver’s number (located on the driver’s id visible in the backseat). The site then posts the comment on the appropriate pages for public viewing, and sends a message back with the URL.My quick take: It’s like the Yelp for taxi drivers. I can’t imagine a cab pulling up and you checking their reviews before you get in, but it could be useful for taxi management.
	BigMapple From developer: BigMapple places NYC public and cultural events on an interactive map that uses data from Twitter and Flickr to show users what people are doing and saying throughout NYC.My quick take:
	Localnext From developer: LocalNext provides an intuitive way for New Yorkers to find the city’s latest and greatest events filtered by location, category, and timeframe.My quick take: LocalNext suffers from lack of data. If they can combine what they have today plus other sources of data, it would be a great resource to find out what’s happening in a local area of NYC.
	WayFinder NYC From developer: Find the nearest and best directions to New York City subway and NJ Path stations on your Android phone.Way to go! Wayfinder, NYC’s augmented reality app, is designed to help you locate the subway and PATH stations nearest you.My quick take: Holy moly I wish I had an Android Phone. As a huge subway fan, this app looks awesome. It uses the latest crazy of augmented reality to find the subway stations closest to you. If they could combine this with a basic transport trip app, it could be even better.
	Hey Walkies From developer: Hey Walkies is a website and iphone application designed to bring people and puppies together. While dog owners may know the whereabouts of dog parks in their own neighborhoods, as of yet there is not a resource for locating dog parks around the city. Hey Walkies helps owners find parks for their dogs to play in wherever they may be in NYC. Hey Walkies also taps into Facebook, bringing the world’s largest social network to the people and pups that use our site.My quick take: Woof, woof, woofie, woof.

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The 2010 version of this contest is now live!

We’ve written about NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s Media2020 plan to help boost the media industry in NYC. Part of the initiative is to strengthen the way the city shares data with the public. Earlier this year we saw the launch of NYC Big Apps Ideas which offered a way to crowdsource the ideas that might eventually be developed as part of the NYC Big Apps program which is launching today.

Bloomberg has posted a welcome message on the site and he notes, “Today, the City launched the inaugural NYC BigApps Competition to encourage talented application developers to create innovative online and mobile applications to serve New York City residents, businesses, and visitors. By developing these apps, you can help us make City government more accessible to all New Yorkers.”

There are 170 data sets that developers and entrepreneurs can work with. The data ranges from voting districts, school districts, citywide events schedules and restaurant inspections. I didn’t see anything related to the transit system listed which is a bit disappointing considering how much I think we could help people move around the city using technology.

Each submitted application must use at least one data source available on the NYC.gov Data Mine and can be developed for mobile or basically any computer platform. The applications must be distributed for free and must be submitted by December 8. The NYC Big Apps website was developed by NY-based ChallengePost.

The judges are your typical list of NYC venture capitalists along with California-based Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis. Nothing against Jason but I am a bit confused by Jason’s judge position considering he doesn’t live here and his company is located in California. I can think of 50 local tech people that could have filled the judge slot – amazing that we need to go thousands of miles away to find a judge.

The prizes for the competition include dinner with the Mayor and cash prizes ranging from  $1,500 to $5,000.

Jenna Wortham at the NY Times has additional commentary on the launch.

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