This week at NYCEDC
- We directed you to our NYCEDC incubators throughout the five boroughs
- We discovered the ratio of single men to single women in the NYC area
- We showed you the New York City population by borough
- We shared Mayor Bloomberg’s video on our World to NYC program
- We Instagrammed one of our favorite Queens locales, The Museum of the Moving Image
- We informed you of our Blueprint to Success program for M/W/DBEs
- We invited you to this weekend’s Cleanweb Hackathon
- We caught up with previous BigApps winner Ben Sann
- We introduced you to our revamped website, which is better, faster, and stronger
- We read a write-up in The Atlantic on New York’s growing technology hub
Have a great weekend, New York City!
Photo credit: photognyc/Flickr
Hacking Green Data
Go green with the Cleanweb Hackathon this weekend, where developers will hack together apps using energy and environmental data. The event kicks off Friday night with an icebreaker at the New York Academy of the Sciences, continues Saturday with an all-day, all-night hackathon at NYU ITP, and concludes Sunday with demos and an awards presentation.
The list of judges includes Fred Wilson, Principal of Union Square Ventures; Rachel Sterne, NYC Chief Digital Officer; Frank Rimalovski, Managing Director, NYU Innovation Venture Fund; Evan Korth, Co-founder of HackNY; Mike Shimazu, Innovation and Business Development at NYSERDA; and Maria Gotsch, President and CEO at the New York City Investment Fund. Aneesh Chopra, United States Chief Technology Officer, will also join as a special guest.
Register today for the Cleanweb Hackathon and explore the APIs and datasets available.
NYC GovFresh Awards
NYCEDC has entered the 2011 GovFresh Awards, which honor innovative city government technology projects over the past year. This is a great opportunity to recognize all the work that New York City has done in improving government transparency and connecting with citizens.
We encourage you to vote today for the following awards:
- New York City for the “City of the Year” award
- NYC BigApps for the “Best Government/Citizen Collaboration” award (NYCEDC)
- NYC BigApps 3.0 Hackathon for the “Best Civic Hackathon” award (NYCEDC)
- Reinvent NYC.gov for the “Best Civic Hackathon” award
- NYC Open Data for “Best Open Data Platform” award
- New York City Emergency Management for “Best Use of Social Media for Emergency Management” award
Voting ends soon – on December 11th!
It’s very easy to sign up to vote, and you will have 10 votes to distribute among the initiatives. Please share this with your friends and colleagues. Thank you!
New York Times: “‘Scene Near Me’ Hackers: From BigApps to TimesOpen”
The New York Times explores NYC BigApps 3.0 Hackathon winner, Scene Near Me:
Avinash Dabir, Dan Blumberg and Luis Miranda [pictured above] are friends who live and work in New York City. Miranda works in financial services technology, while Dabir and Blumberg are media professionals. They signed up for their first hackathon, the two-day BigApps 3.0 Hackathon put together by the New York City Economic Development Commission to “create apps that use city data to make NYC better.”
The three spent their mostly sleepless 36-hour code sprint making an app called “Scene Near Me”. It mashes up movie locations from a city database with the Foursquare API for personal location information, so when a Foursquare user checks in, they learn if famous New York movie scenes occurred close by.
Dabir narrated the experience for the demo, “I check in from here, Pivotal Labs,” (the site of the Big Apps hackathon). “I get a text message alert, ‘Scene Near Me: You’re a stone’s throw away from where scenes in Taxi Driver were filmed.’”
