With All Things Digital Global HQ located in the heart of the Castro in San Francisco, BoomTown tries hard not to judge–even that dude who likes to come into the Starbucks (SBUX) naked.

But I made an exception to be a judge for an innovative civic geek contest that New York City is doing for the second year called BigApps 2.0.

Get it? Big Apple…BigApps!

In any case, Mayor Michael Bloomberg is opening up a whole mess of government information–350 data sets from more than 40 agencies–and letting software developers have at it.

According to NYC:

“The City continues to open more data on the www.NYC.gov Data Mine as part of transparency initiative. The Data Mine was established for last year’s competition and, as part of the City’s efforts to promote transparency across agencies, all data will remain available for public use after the conclusion of the competition. Additional datasets will be made available throughout the year.”

Some of the new juicy data includes: CompStat data, buildings complaints and real-time traffic numbers.

The winners for the best apps created to help New York City citizens will get cash prizes totaling $20,000.

Last year, there were 84 apps, including a winner from Big Apple Ed, a guide to schools there.

The new winners will be announced in March of 2011, after fellow judges of mine–including Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson, Hunch CEO Chris Dixon and Betaworks CEO John Borthwick–decide who is the best.

And how much do you want to bet there will be a bed-bug app submitted this year?

Here’s the official press release from NYC:

MAYOR BLOOMBERG Launches NYC BIGAPPS 2.0 COMPETITION

More than 350 Datasets Provided by More than 40 City Agencies and Commissions, Doubling Last Year’s Availability

Competition Builds on Citywide Efforts to Increase Government Transparency and Provide Greater Public Access to City Data

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, Deputy Mayor for Economic Development Robert K. Steel and Deputy Mayor for Operations Stephen Goldsmith today launched NYC BigApps 2.0, the second annual contest for software developers and members of the public to create web or mobile applications using City data. Building upon the success of the inaugural NYC BigApps Competition launched in October 2009, the City has roughly doubled the number of datasets available, bringing the total to more than 350. These datasets provide developers and programmers with additional material, including public safety data, buildings complaints, and real-time traffic numbers from which to create new digital applications. Last year’s winning applications are today helping New Yorkers find mass transit routes, review public school information and gather an array of information based on their current location. This year’s winning applications will receive cash prizes totaling $20,000. Deputy Mayor Steel will detail the program this evening at NY Tech Meetup, a monthly meeting of tech entrepreneurs where companies and developers demonstrate new technologies. Deputy Mayor Steel will be joined at the announcement by New York City Economic Development Corporation President Seth W. Pinsky, Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications Commissioner Carole Post and Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment Commissioner Katherine Oliver.

“NYC BigApps combines two of our Administration’s important priorities: making civic information more readily available to New Yorkers and promoting innovation and entrepreneurship in New York City,” said Mayor Bloomberg. “The inaugural NYC BigApps competition yielded an array of creative uses for City data, and–with nearly twice as much data formatted for application use this year–there are even more possibilities with version 2.0.”

“The most important thing that the public sector can do to help create jobs through technology innovation is to provide our talented entrepreneurs with the tools to create new products,” said Deputy Mayor Steel. “The BigApps competition does this by providing open access to City Data. Through the competition, we encourage the development of applications that can then be commercialized, spurring job growth and economic development in New York City.”

“NYC BigApps is redefining the relationship between City agencies and enterprising citizens, all while delivering value to the public,” said Deputy Mayor Goldsmith. “Last year, NYC BigApps contestants came up with innovative applications that would have never been created in the normal course of business. There is more data available for use in this year’s competition, so the potential for new and innovative tools that can benefit New Yorkers is even greater.”

“Last year’s Big Apps competition was an enormously successful way to achieve multiple goals: supporting the City’s important technology sector, giving entrepreneurs opportunities to create new products, and increasing the accessibility and transparency of City government,” said New York City Economic Development Corporation President Pinsky. “This year’s expanded contest promises to promote even more innovation and creative thinking among the vibrant and growing tech community in New York. We look forward to seeing the results of their efforts.”

“NYC BigApps, and the DataMine site that supports it, sits at the heart of the City’s open data efforts,” said Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications Commissioner Post. “This effort complements the many other ways we’ve worked to bring technology to life for New Yorkers, including 311 Online and the 311 iPhone app. Beyond today’s competition, we’ll continue enhancing the functionality of DataMine and expanding the amount of data available there for use across the City and around the globe.”

“At the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment, we’re exploring new ways to share information about City resources and services across multiple platforms,” said Commissioner Oliver. “Already we’ve reached new audiences through QR codes on the Staten Island Ferry and on the sides of sanitation trucks, and we’re making the content of our online Video On Demand player available on various mobile devices. The NYC BigApps Competition is the perfect opportunity to further communication between the government and the public.”

The NYC BigApps Competition is open to individuals, and companies and non-profit organizations with fewer than 50 employees. More than 160 datasets have been added to the 190 compiled for the inaugural competition. New York City Economic Development Corporation and the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications coordinated with over 40 City agencies and commissions to provide the datasets, with 15 new City agencies, including the Department of Environmental Protection, the School Construction Authority and the Campaign Finance Board, participating in Data Mine for the first time. New data on public safety, the City budget, complaints to the Department of Buildings, and real-time traffic information will all be available for download today at www.nyc.gov/data .

The Data Mine was established for last year’s competition and, as part of the City’s efforts to promote transparency across agencies, all data will remain available for public use after the conclusion of the competition. Additional datasets will be made available throughout the year. Information and updates on the NYC BigApps competition, as well as official rules, can be accessed at the competition website: www.NYCBigApps.com .

Fourteen winners will be chosen in total, including two new prizes–best application created by a high school, college or full-time graduate school student; and a Large Organization Recognition Award for organizations with 50 or more employees, which will not eligible for a cash prize. A panel of judges from the technology and venture capital community will select winners for Best Overall Application (Grand Prize, Second Prize, Third Prize and five honorable mentions), Investor’s Choice Application, City Talent Award, Student Award, and the Large Organization Recognition Award. Two Popular Choice Application awards will be determined by public voting. Judging criteria will include the benefit to residents, visitors and City government; the quality and implementation of the idea; and potential commercial value.

All submissions are due on January 12, 2011. The Popular Choice Application winners will be selected by public vote through www.NYCBigApps.com between January 26 and February 26. Winners will be selected and announced at an awards ceremony to be held in March.

Last year’s winners included: WayFinder NYC–an application that allows users to find the nearest and best directions to New York City subway and New Jersey PATH stations; 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); 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 ; and NYC Way–an iPhone application that bundles more than 30 New York City resources and provides information sorted by the user’s current location. The developer of NYC Way, MyCityWay, received the first investment by the NYC Entrepreneurial Fund, a $22 million seed and early-stage investment fund established by the City and managed by FirstMark Capital.

The judging panel is comprised of: Dawn Barber, Founder, Tech Meetup; John Borthwick, CEO, Betaworks; Chris Dixon, CEO & Co-founder, Hunch; Esther Dyson, Chairman, Edventure; Stuart Ellman, Co-Founder & General Partner, RRE Ventures; Lawrence Lenihan, Founder, CEO and Managing Director, FirstMark Capital; Danny Schultz, Co-founder & Managing Director, Draper Fisher Jurvetson Gotham Ventures; Naveen Selvadurai, Co-founder, Foursquare; Kara Swisher, Co-Executive Editor, AllThingsD.com; and Union Square Ventures Partner Fred Wilson.

“We are thrilled to be powering the second NYC BigApps competition, with significantly more data made available for software developers and the general public,” said ChallengePost Founder and CEO Brandon Kessler. “We were wowed by the creativity of the apps in the first competition, and we look forward to giving new entrants the great exposure they deserve.”

“New York is home to some of the world’s best developers,” said Foursquare Co-founder Naveen Selvadurai. “It is great to see the City rewarding this talent and taking advantage of it to increase transparency and make the wealth of information on NYC.gov more easily accessible.”

The Palm (PALM) Pre officially went on sale this morning, and judging from initial reports–and my experience at a local Northern California Sprint store–neither demand or supply was particularly overwhelming. Certainly, lines for the device were far shorter than those that extended from Apple (AAPL) stores for the launches of the iPhone and the iPhone 3G.

Arriving outside my local Sprint (S) store about an hour after they first opened, I found not a queue of eager Pre-buyers, but two kids making forts out of a few Pre shipping boxes left outside the store. Inside the store, I found a group of nine people waiting in line to add their names to a waiting list for the device, which was already sold out at this location. A Sprint rep refused to tell me how many Pres had been sold this morning, but admitted that the shipment had been a small one.

The situation is apparently the same across the country. The Boston Globe reports that Sprint’s Back Bay store sold out of its 55 Pres by 11 AM. An informal survey by 24/7 Wall Street reveals sell outs or fast-dwindling supplies of the device at Sprint and Best Buy stores in Chicago, Houston, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Four of the five Best Buy stores I contacted reported selling out of the Pre very quickly; one representative told me his store had just four of the devices and he believed that to be the case at many other locations.

Sprint stores I spoke with in LA, Chicago and Boston told me they’d sold out by late morning.

Q: How many names on the list? A: “We’re not allowed to say.” A reader tells me that the line outside the W. Division Street in Chicago was at least 50 people long, and that the store started wait-listing people somewhere around #36. Another reader reports a line of about 20 people outside an Emeryville, CA Sprint store. That same reader claims a clerk told him the store had 60 Pres on hand. Still another reader reports that the line outside Sprint’s Market Street store in San Francisco started at 6 AM this morning. There were a dozen or so folks in line by about 7:30 AM. Finally, another reader reports that a Sprint store in San Francisco’s Castro district had a line of about 40 people when she showed up to get in line at 7 AM. That location, too, sold out quickly.

Four phones at the local Best Buy? Stores in Marin, LA and Chicago sold out within hours? Makes you wonder if Palm and Sprint are purposely constraining supply to foster an image of overwhelming demand.

This week, I went on a trek to downtown San Francisco–from ATD HQ, located in the wilds of the Castro–to visit David Sifry, the jovial Web entrepreneur who recently launched Offbeat Guides.

The San Francisco-based start-up makes “personalized, up-to-date travel guides that cover over 30,000 travel destinations, using a combination of search technology and curation by both amateur and professional travel experts.”

In other words, on-demand travel books, with a touch of humanity–an obvious and even innovative trend as custom printing gets cheaper.

But Sifry is also putting the guides on digital devices, like the Kindle from Amazon (AMZN).

Sifry, who also founded the blog search engine Technorati, talked to BoomTown about the business and gave me a quick tour of its HQ near Union Square.

Here’s the video interview:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090515/kara-visits-offbeat-guides/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20080916/yahoos-new-marketing-push-purple-rain-actually-purple-pain/ http://allthingsd.com/20080916/yahoos-new-marketing-push-purple-rain-actually-purple-pain/#comments Tue, 16 Sep 2008 07:14:29 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=3816

First off, as Digital Daily’s John Paczkowski pointed out to me today, you have to give Yahoo props for using Gogol Bordello as the soundtrack and–more to the point–actually knowing about Gogol Bordello in the first place.

“Since when does [Yahoo CEO Jerry] Yang listen to gypsy punk?” asked Paczkowski in an email to me today.

Since Bill Gates started eating churros with Jerry Seinfeld and adjusting his skivvies hands-free, that’s when!

Oh dear, Yahoo (YHOO) has succumbed to the hipster, ironic thing–an unfortunate marketing virus that has hit Microsoft (MSFT) of late too–in an under-the-covers “Start Wearing Purple” online marketing campaign.

The Internet company is now out with a Web site touting itself, advocating that people “celebrate purple.”

Purple and yellow have always been Yahoo’s colors–even while Google (GOOG) just up-and-grabbed the whole spectrum and emerged victorious.

Nonetheless, Yahoo is going to town on the purple idea, using a lot of its tools and products in the process to show itself off.

The effort starts with a video of multiracial hipsters doing wacky stuff, including a yodeling Yang (see at top), which makes it look like a very alternative version of “High School Musical.”

Also on the site: See purple-inspired photos from Flickr; view videos of “Purple Pranks” (first up, of course, ringers singing the purple song in an elevator to unsuspecting folks); peruse profiles of “Purple Picks” (like the cool crafts site Etsy and artist Clarence Lee) and “Purple Pioneers” (a mix of do-gooders and more hipsters, so far); and even search the word “purple” on Yahoo to fun-filled results.

There’s also a bunch of purple bikes apparently traveling the globe and taking pictures that will be uploaded to a Flickr map. And, natch, you can buy purple clothes.

After trolling the site for a bit, I can tell you I live in the dead center of San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood and we don’t get that purple here ever!

In other words, it’s all very high-concept, much like the dancing guy video that Yahoo did recently (see that very sweet morale-building video at the very bottom).

But to really resonate with the mass of users Yahoo needs to hold onto, as dull as this sounds, I would just like a simple explanation of why I should use Yahoo in my daily life.

The legendary Apple (AAPL) Mac-PC ads that Yahoo and Microsoft are clearly trying to mimic are good primarily because they have a message in each funny exchange about why you need to own a Mac.

Not so much with this quirky Yahoo effort, which is laudable, but a waste of time.

In the main “celebrate purple” video on the site, part of the tag line is: “Deep inside everyone is a Yahoo! waiting to come out. Set yourself free with a little purple.”

Actually, deep inside Yahoo is a Yahoo waiting to come out. And it is going to take more than purple to coax that magical creature out into the light again.

[ See post to watch video ]

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