This weekend, we stopped by the NYC BigApps Hackathon at the offices of Huffington Post! Developers and teams assembled Saturday and Sunday to build apps related to Healthy Living and Lifelong Learning and compete for $10,000 in cash prizes.
Check out the winners of this Hackathon:
Healthy Living
Pavlov Health
Acting like Pavlov, this mobile app helps condition the user to make healthy choices. The app will detect your location, allow you to set your preferences and then act on its own to guide you towards the healthy locations around you and on your route.HealthBux
HealthBux helps more New Yorkers take advantage of the NYC Health Bucks program so that they and their families lead healthier lives.Salmon: Don’t Just Get There
Salmon is an app that allows users to find paths between destinations that encourage movement, health, and well being.Lifelong Learning
Plexx. Training the World
Plexx is a mobile training app where people can learn the skills they need to obtain a job and build a career.CUNY Bound
CUNY Bound is an open source educational resource for the 11,000 underprepared high school graduates who arrive to New York community colleges every year. The website offers interactive tools for reviewing the standard math, reading, and writing material covered by New York City curriculum.LearnTogether - Online Study Groups for MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses)
LearnTogether provides online study groups for students who are taking Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs).
Learn how to get involved with NYC BigApps, New York City’s ultimate data software challenge offering $150,000 in prizes. The submission deadline is June 7 at 5:00 PM EST.
Photo credit: Grace Cheung/NYCEDC
NYC BigApps Jobs and Economic Mobility Hackathon
Photos and blog post by Noelle Marcus, Project Manager, Center for Economic Transformation
The two-day NYC BigApps Jobs and Economic Mobility Hackathon at New Work City on April 20-21 featured speakers and experts from New York City’s top organizations fighting poverty and solving key workforce development challenges.
We kicked off the weekend with two stirring keynotes from Tom Hilliard, a senior fellow at the Center for an Urban Future, as well as an inspiring testimony on the power of civic technology from Austin’s hottest socially driven startup, Aunt Bertha. Fourteen teams demoed their projects and apps on Sunday night to a notable group of judges from The Huffington Post, Aunt Bertha, Robin Hood, Coatue and Blue Ridge Foundations.
$5,000 in cash prizes were awarded to three great teams whose apps best address problems related to Jobs and Economic Mobility:
First Prize: Child Care Desk
Child Card Desk helps you find quality child care near you. We aim to show real time availability and social rankings for this essential service, making a terrible experience pleasant and useful.
Second Prize: Plexx
Plexx is a training center in your pocket. We build a mobile training portal where young people without a college degree can learn the skills they need to obtain an entry level job and build a career.
Third Prize: App.lied.at
Job seekers apply for a lot of jobs through various job board sites. It’s hard to keep track of where you applied. We’ve fixed this problem.
Honorable Mention: Helping Hands
Helping Hands is a mobile app and website that hopes to take some of the luck out of the equation, and make the help that’s out there more accessible, organized, and give people a positive voice from their peers.
Browse all the Jobs NYC BigApps projects!
Transportation app Roadify was the winner of the 2011 NYC BigApps competition. Watch how their business has grown since in New York City, then find out more about entering this year’s BigApps at www.nycbigapps.com.
Announcing NYC BigApps 2013
New York City is going big with the launch of NYC BigApps 2013, the fourth annual BigApps competition to promote government transparency and innovative new technologies, at tonight’s New York Tech Meetup event. Powered by CollabFinder, this year’s competition, which challenges mobile and web developers to create cool, free apps for New Yorkers, has upped the ante, offering big prizes for apps that solve BigIssues specific to NYC using a bigger pool of data than ever before.
This year, in conjunction with NYC DoITT, and in partnership with BMW iVentures and eBay, Inc., we are excited to make the following announcements:
- We’re challenging developers to create apps that solve BigIssues facing New Yorkers in four specific areas: Jobs and Workforce Mobility; Healthy Living; Lifelong Learning; and Cleanweb: Energy, Environment and Resilience.
- This year’s cash awards total $150,000. The Grand Prize winner for NYC BigApps 2013 is eligible to win up to $60,000!
- We’re expanding our eligible data resource base. Applicants can pick at least one data set from NYC Open Data or other approved federal, state, city and private data sets and APIs; generate at least one new, original data set through the app; or mix and match any of these approaches.
We’re hosting an all weekend BigApps Expo and Hackathon on April 6-7 at eBay to help jumpstart developer efforts. Come join fellow developers, designers, hackers and entrepreneurs in a creative and collaborative space to build awesome apps to enter into the competition.
Our panel of judges features renowned experts in the field. Don’t miss the chance for once in a lifetime exposure to this prestigious group of judges:
- Dawn Barber, Co-founder, New York Tech Meetup
- John Borthwick, CEO, Betaworks
- Arianna Huffington, Chair, President, and Editor-in-Chief of the Huffington Post Media Group
- Lawrence Lenihan, Founder, CEO, and Managing Director, FirstMark Capital
- Ann Li, Managing Director, Center for Economic Transformation, NYCEDC
- Rahul Merchant, Commissioner, NYC Department of Information Technology & Telecommunications
- Ulrich Quay, Managing Director, BMW iVentures
- Danny Schultz, Co-founder & Managing Director, DFJ Gotham Ventures
- David Tisch, Managing Partner, BoxGroup
- Fred Wilson, Managing Partner, Union Square Ventures
NYC BigApps 2013 is just one more example of the City’s ongoing efforts to empower NYC’s amazing developers and entrepreneurs by awarding generous cash prizes; offering invaluable startup support, such as the BigApps Founders Network; and granting participants complete IP ownership of their apps.
Submissions for NYC BigApps 2013 are due by 5:00 PM EST on June 7, 2013 – so start coding! Find out more at www.nycbigapps.com.
NYC BigApps Is Coming Soon
Move over Samsung – The Next Big Thing is almost here. We are working with CollabFinder to bring the biggest, boldest, and best BigApps ever! While we can’t divulge our secrets yet, yesterday we gave a sneak peek at Social Media Week event: “We Built this City: The State of Civic Technology, with Code for America and IDEO.”
Entering its fourth year, the NYC BigApps competition promotes government transparency and innovative new technologies by challenging mobile and web developers to create cool, free apps for New Yorkers using City data.
Get involved: Sign up now at www.nycbigapps.com to be the first to know about any updates on New York City’s ultimate open data software challenge. Trust us – you don’t want to miss a thing.
Exciting things are underway for NYC BigApps, the City’s premier open data software competition!
While we’re not ready to reveal all the surprises in store just yet, we are excited to announce that NYC BigApps 2013 will focus on leveraging technology to help solve NYC’s key challenges, or “BigIssues.”
CitizenConnect, for example, helps tackle a BigIssue with a focus on income mobility, workforce support, and job placement.
Now is your chance to weigh in on what BigIssues the BigApps community should tackle this year. Share your great ideas and get involved by completing our brief survey!
Photo Credit: Karin Beil via Flickr
Congratulations to TENDIGI, the first tech startup to graduate the NYU-Poly DUMBO Incubator:
Mr. Soto, founder of TENDIGI, said he brought his business to the incubator because it was affordable space and an instant tech scene.
“We were surrounded with a bunch of other startups,” he said. “It was important to be in that space and see other people that are growing their companies. For us it made sense to be in that space. A few months later, we got a lot of new work, and things just started really accelerating.”
Read more in Crain’s New York Business and find out about the DUMBO Incubator, part of the City’s network of affordable workspaces.
Tomorrow’s Tech Entrepreneurs: Congratulations to the winners and all the participants of NYC Generation Tech, a program designed to educate and inspire high school students from disadvantaged areas across New York City to pursue careers in entrepreneurship and technology. After a five-month process in which the students received hands-on learning experiences and mentorship opportunities, the program concluded last night with the NYC GenTech Demo Night held at the NASDAQ MarketSite in Times Square. All 28 participating students, divided into six teams, presented and demonstrated their innovative ideas to a panel of judges comprised of leaders from the tech community.
The grand prize was awarded to SkooBrik, which designed a mobile app to help students organize their schoolwork digitally, monitor their grades, and set deadlines with customizable reminders. For their efforts, SkooBrik was awarded $5,000 to be used to further develop their ideas and fund college and career prospects, as well as a lunch meeting to discuss their app with Andy Weissman, partner at the venture capital firm Union Square Ventures.
“Through NYC Generation Tech, we are committed to assisting the City’s future entrepreneurs. This innovative program is an important piece of our ongoing efforts to foster talent within the City’s growing technology sector. I want to thank our partner, the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship, as well as our partners at some of the top New York City companies who have provided our students with invaluable mentorship and learning experiences, enabling them to discover new career opportunities in the City’s innovation economy.” - NYCEDC President Seth Pinsky
Read more about the high school students’ mobile apps created through NYC Generation Tech.
Facebook speaks to NYC Generation Tech high school students last night at their headquarters:
“Launch quickly and iterate.”
“Stay focused and keep shipping.”
NYC Generation Tech is a new initiative by NYCEDC and the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship to provide mentorship for disadvantaged high school students interested in technology. The program, which is still in the pilot phase, consists of a two-week summer bootcamp followed by a series of weeknight meetings in the fall, hosted at the local offices of top tech companies like Google, NASDAQ and Warby Parker. The 30 accepted students work in teams to develop a mobile app prototype targeted at other New York City students using MIT App Inventor.
On Friday night mingling in the recently opened collaborative space for start-ups AlleyNYC were people from different walks of life, each with an interest in the area or an idea. There was a psychiatrist who wanted to create crowd-funded solar projects, and someone who works in an IT department of a consumer magazine who’s interested in developing apps that would help increase the fuel economy of cars. Over the weekend, some 200 people participated in the hackathon.
By Sunday, judges picked three winners: Green Building Banner, a Google Chrome plug-in that brings energy data to consumers; Lean Green Stormwater, an online tool, which allows facility owners to calculate stormwater charges and savings under various stormwater mitigation investments; and Parkifi, a mobile app that helps users find a New York park with a Wi-Fi hotspot.
