Last night, Mayor Bloomberg announced the winners of NYC BigApps 3.0, the third annual competition for software developers and members of the public to create web or mobile applications using official City data. A total of 11 winning applications were selected from a record 96 eligible applications that were submitted for this year’s contest. The NYC BigApps 3.0 winners are:

Best Overall Application

  • Grand Prize: NYCFacets - seeks to streamline and simplify the process for accessing, understanding, and utilizing the tremendous amount of data available in City’s NYC Open Data site.
  • Second Prize: Work+ - helps New Yorkers who traditionally work from home find nearby locations to work in their communities.

Popular Choice Award

  • Grand Prize: New York Trip Builder - a travel site that helps users personalize a trip in just a few quick steps.
  • Second Prize: Scene Near Me - provides alerts when users are near legendary New York City movie scenes. 

Investor’s Choice Award

  • The Funday Genie - an application designed to help users plan a free day in New York City.

Best Mobility App

  • Embark NYC - an application designed to make taking the subway simple.

Best Green App

  • 596 Acres - a public education project aimed at making communities in Brooklyn aware of the land resources around them.

Best Education App

  • Sage: Pre-K and Elementary Schools Search - a mobile application that enables parents to search by location for nearby NYC public Pre-K and elementary schools.

Best Health & Safety App

  • TestFlip.com Personal Safety App (Lite) for NYC - a personal emergency web mobile application which helps alert the nearest Police Precinct, provides a custom emergency phone number by SMS or provides a pre-scripted voice message or a custom email by simply pressing one Emergency Button. 

Best NYC Mashup

  • Work+

Best Student Award

  • ParkAlly - an application which simplifies the search for available parking spots and eliminates the inconveniences associated with parking in heavily populated areas.

City Talent Award

  • Uhpartments - provides building maintenance reports for those users seeking apartments.

First launched in 2009 as part of the City’s ongoing efforts to increase transparency in government, as well as to improve the quality of life for New Yorkers and visitors, BigApps has grown each year and this year included more than 230 new datasets from more than 60 City agencies, commissions, and Business Improvement Districts, for a total of nearly 750 available data sets for developers.

Check out all the winning apps and read much more in the official press release. Congratulations to all who participated in this year’s competition!

via nycedc:

(via nycdigital)

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IBM, Dolphins partner to improve fan experience - South Florida Business Journal The Miami Dolphins have partnered with IBM to improve the fan experience by gaining insight into Sun Life Stadium operations. Using the IBM (NYSE: IBM) Intelligent Operations Center for Smarter Cities, stadium officials can access real-time data ranging from weather alerts and security information to stadium traffic flow and fan concession preferences, a press release said.

IBM, Dolphins partner to improve fan experience - South Florida Business Journal

The Miami Dolphins have partnered with IBM to improve the fan experience by gaining insight into Sun Life Stadium operations.

Using the IBM (NYSE: IBM) Intelligent Operations Center for Smarter Cities, stadium officials can access real-time data ranging from weather alerts and security information to stadium traffic flow and fan concession preferences, a press release said.

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IBM CMO Study Part 2: Challenges in the Digital Age - Business Analytics

In the second part of this series, we look at new digital challenges that IBM’s CMO study pinpoints, including the explosion of data and mobile devices.

In the first part of this article, we discussed how IBM’s new CMO study, which gathered information from nearly 2,000 chief marketing officers worldwide, reveals marketers lagging to keep up with new social media trends. In addition to this shift, the study shows several other key challenges, including information overload and new devices, facing CMOs today.

While CMOs are struggling to gauge consumer opinions on social media platforms, they are also having trouble using social media as a communication tool.

According to the research, “56 percent of CMOs viewing social media as a key engagement channel.” The various choices in platforms—from Twitter and Facebook to YouTube—and the vast numbers of users makes it complex for companies to reach a targeted audience.

The study identifies the worldwide data explosion as another key challenge facing CMOs. “The increasing volume, variety and velocity of data available from new digital sources like social networks, in addition to traditional sources such as sales data and market research, tops the list of CMO challenges,” IBM reports. With such massive amounts of information, obtaining valuable and accurate insights about consumer views can be nearly impossible.

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IBM's Irving Wladawsky-Berger sings praises of Linux | V3.co.uk

A former IBM executive who helped to establish the company’s Linux operation has provided an overview of how IBM plans to use the operating system in its future platforms.

Dr Irving Wladawsky-Berger, chairman emeritus of the IBM Academy of Technology, told attendees at the LinuxCon conference that IBM originally chose Linux for its versatility and scalability.

Wladawsky-Berger explained that IBM was drawn to the operating system because it was scalable enough to power supercomputing clusters, while still being flexible enough to run on platforms ranging from servers to embedded devices.

“IBM has multiple platforms with multiple architectures, and Linux gave us the opportunity to have an OS that runs on all of them,” he said. “We said this is pretty nifty: to write for one platform and then port it to all the others.”

Wladawsky-Berger sees this versatility paying off for IBM and Linux in the coming years, adding that Linux will play a prominent role in the evolution of computing with the rise of mobile devices in emerging markets and the growth of cloud systems.

IBM is also making Linux a central part of its Smarter Cities initiative. Wladawsky-Berger said that large-scale analytics and simulation tools will drive the need for Linux-based cluster systems to meet the rise in connected appliances and embedded systems.


Read more: 

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Geoffrey West on Urban Planning and Sustainability… The environment. It’s very complicated. There are so many angles you could approach the subject from. But Geoffrey West, a physicist who is trying to figure our cities, has a very cut and dry scientific take on the issue of the environment. Turns out, it’s all about wattage. (Read the rest of the article on Mr. West in the NY Times.) via thelunchroom:

Geoffrey West on Urban Planning and Sustainability…

The environment. It’s very complicated. There are so many angles you could approach the subject from. But Geoffrey West, a physicist who is trying to figure our cities, has a very cut and dry scientific take on the issue of the environment. Turns out, it’s all about wattage. (Read the rest of the article on Mr. West in the NY Times.)

via thelunchroom:

(via thelunchroom)

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The power of analytics for public sector: Building analytics competency to accelerate outcomes Complex societal, economic, political and environmental pressures are placing intense demands on public sector organizations to make smarter decisions, deliver results and demonstrate accountability. An unprecedented “information explosion” both facilitates and complicates the ability of governments and institutions to achieve and influence desirable outcomes. A tremendous opportunity exists to use the growing mountain of data to make better fact-based decisions. Yet, the volume of data and its increasingly diverse and interactive nature can also paralyze organizations as they try to separate the noteworthy from the not-worthy. Download the executive summary (786KB) Register to download the complete IBM Institute for Business Value executive report via smarterplanet:

The power of analytics for public sector: Building analytics competency to accelerate outcomes

Complex societal, economic, political and environmental pressures are placing intense demands on public sector organizations to make smarter decisions, deliver results and demonstrate accountability.

An unprecedented “information explosion” both facilitates and complicates the ability of governments and institutions to achieve and influence desirable outcomes. A tremendous opportunity exists to use the growing mountain of data to make better fact-based decisions. Yet, the volume of data and its increasingly diverse and interactive nature can also paralyze organizations as they try to separate the noteworthy from the not-worthy.

via smarterplanet:

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IBM Unveils CityForward.org Data Site for Urban Planners Source: Wall St. Journal IBM on Wednesday introduced CityForward.org, a new free website intended to provide more complete data to city planners, as well as community groups and individuals. The site doesn’t actually create data, but aggregates data sets from various agencies in more than 50 cities around the world, with data from another 30 cities being added soon. According to John Tolva, IBM’s director of citizenship and technology, city data such as traffic patterns, crime statistics, or consumer spending are already available to planners, but “fairly opaque” and difficult to access because it’s published in PDFs and spreadsheets, and often requires even government employees to navigate complex inter-agency bureaucracies. Tolva said that putting the data online makes it easier to read, chart, and correlate with data from other agencies or localities. For example, he told Digits, a researcher in San Francisco was able to compare calls from a given neighborhood to the city’s 311 hot line with 911 calls from the same neighborhood, and then correlate vagrancy with a particular type of drug use. “It’s a more nuanced version of the broken window theory” (which posits that vandalism leads to additional criminal behavior), he said. Tolva said he hopes that the site will contribute to a “renaissance in the profession of urban planning,” which has often had to rely more on anecdotes than data. He pointed to a chart evaluating the impact on traffic of increased tolls on bridges and tunnels in New York City as an example of how this kind of data could be used to influence public debate on topics like congestion pricing — a failed 2008 proposal to limit automobile traffic in Manhattan during the week. “The discussion [in 2008] wasn’t exactly data-driven,” Tolva noted.

IBM Unveils CityForward.org Data Site for Urban Planners

Source: Wall St. Journal

IBM on Wednesday introduced CityForward.org, a new free website intended to provide more complete data to city planners, as well as community groups and individuals. The site doesn’t actually create data, but aggregates data sets from various agencies in more than 50 cities around the world, with data from another 30 cities being added soon.

According to John Tolva, IBM’s director of citizenship and technology, city data such as traffic patterns, crime statistics, or consumer spending are already available to planners, but “fairly opaque” and difficult to access because it’s published in PDFs and spreadsheets, and often requires even government employees to navigate complex inter-agency bureaucracies. Tolva said that putting the data online makes it easier to read, chart, and correlate with data from other agencies or localities.

For example, he told Digits, a researcher in San Francisco was able to compare calls from a given neighborhood to the city’s 311 hot line with 911 calls from the same neighborhood, and then correlate vagrancy with a particular type of drug use. “It’s a more nuanced version of the broken window theory” (which posits that vandalism leads to additional criminal behavior), he said.

Tolva said he hopes that the site will contribute to a “renaissance in the profession of urban planning,” which has often had to rely more on anecdotes than data. He pointed to a chart evaluating the impact on traffic of increased tolls on bridges and tunnels in New York City as an example of how this kind of data could be used to influence public debate on topics like congestion pricing — a failed 2008 proposal to limit automobile traffic in Manhattan during the week. “The discussion [in 2008] wasn’t exactly data-driven,” Tolva noted.

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If you’re always on the lookout for thought-provoking ideas about issues facing our cities, then you’ve come to the right place. Welcome to City Forward, a free, web-based platform that lets you visualize and interact with city data while engaging with a community of people who are passionate about the future of our cities. Go ahead – get started by using the tabs on the left side of the home page. You can see what other City Forward users are doing, tell a story by combining text and data visualizations to create an exploration, view all the data currently available on City Forward, discuss a wide range of exciting topics in the City Forward Community or keep up with our latest ideas and future plans by reading the City Forward Blog.

If you’re always on the lookout for thought-provoking ideas about issues facing our cities, then you’ve come to the right place. Welcome to City Forward, a free, web-based platform that lets you visualize and interact with city data while engaging with a community of people who are passionate about the future of our cities.

Go ahead – get started by using the tabs on the left side of the home page. You can see what other City Forward users are doing, tell a story by combining text and data visualizations to create an exploration, view all the data currently available on City Forward, discuss a wide range of exciting topics in the City Forward Community or keep up with our latest ideas and future plans by reading the City Forward Blog.

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thegreenurbanist: In 2009, Chicago Department of Transportation (CDOT) placed automatic bike counting equipment at many locations around the city. It uses pneumatic tubes to count the number of bicyclists (excludes cars) at that point in the street – it counts ALL trips, and cannot distinguish between people going to work or going to school. The size of the blue dot indicates the bicycle mode share for that count location. Mode share calculated by adding bikes and cars and dividing by bikes. Get the data View the map, at GeoCommons View the raw data, at Google Fusion Tables (filter data; export as CSV or KML files) Download the raw data as CSV (load into Microsoft Excel, OpenOffice, Apple Numbers) Read the report from CDOT (PDF)

thegreenurbanist:

In 2009, Chicago Department of Transportation (CDOT) placed automatic bike counting equipment at many locations around the city. It uses pneumatic tubes to count the number of bicyclists (excludes cars) at that point in the street – it counts ALL trips, and cannot distinguish between people going to work or going to school.

The size of the blue dot indicates the bicycle mode share for that count location. Mode share calculated by adding bikes and cars and dividing by bikes.

Get the data

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