NYC BigApps is an annual competition sponsored by the
New York City Economic Development Corporation
New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) is a public-benefit corporation that serves as the official economic development organization for New York City. NYCEDC gives its mission as strengthening business confidence in New York C ...
. It provides programmers, developers, designers, and entrepreneurs with access to municipal data sets to build technological products that address civic issues affecting New York City. Through the NYC Open Data portal and other private and non-profit data sources, contestants have access to more than 1,000 data sets and APIs. Examples of available data include weekly traffic updates, schedules of citywide events, property sales records, catalogs of restaurant inspections, and geographic data about the location of school and voting districts. The contest is part of a broader
New York City
New York, often called New York City (NYC), is the most populous city in the United States, located at the southern tip of New York State on one of the world's largest natural harbors. The city comprises five boroughs, each coextensive w ...
effort to increase government transparency and encourage
entrepreneurship
Entrepreneurship is the creation or extraction of economic value in ways that generally entail beyond the minimal amount of risk (assumed by a traditional business), and potentially involving values besides simply economic ones.
An entrepreneu ...
.
Results & challenges
Some contest winners have gone on to become viable companies. For example, MyCityWay, was a contest winner in 2010. MyCityWay subsequently raised venture capital funding from FirstMark Capital and IA Ventures, as well as a strategic investment from BMW.
[Embark NYC]
the mass transit application which won Best Mobility App in the NYC BigApps 3.0 competition, received investment from BMW i Ventures in 2012 and was acquired by Apple in 2013.
Yet like many app competitions driven by government data, many of the winning apps have not developed into viable companies. One challenge that civic hacking competitions face is that “they rely on programmers to define problems, instead of citizens or even government itself.” Hana Schank wrote of the 2011 contest that “the problem with the 011BigApps contest is that it leaves both user needs and likely user behavior out of the equation, instead beginning with an enormous data dump and asking developers to make something cool out of it”.[Hana Schank, "New York City’s Digital Deficiency ". Fast Company. December 14, 2011. Retrieved March 4, 2014.]
Recognizing these challenges, the 2013 BigApps competition introduced specific problem briefs organized around five “BigIssues” related to issues affecting New York City: Jobs and Economic Mobility, Cleanweb: Energy, Environment, and Resilience, Healthy Living, and Lifelong Learning. The competition also included events where organizations and City agencies versed in a “BigIssue” presented data sets and ideas to competitors.
Contest judges
Judges for the contest have included:
Dawn Barber, Co-founder, New York Tech Meetup; John Borthwick, CEO, Betaworks; Chris Dixon
Chris Dixon (born ) is an American internet entrepreneur and investor. He is a general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He is also the co-founder and former CEO of Hunch. Dixon is known as a cryptocurrency and Web3 eva ...
, CEO & Co-founder, Hunch; Jack Dorsey
Jack Patrick Dorsey (born November 19, 1976) is an American businessperson, who is a co-founder of Twitter, Inc. and its CEO during 2007–2008 and 2015–2021, as well as co-founder, principal executive officer and chairman of Block, Inc. (deve ...
, CEO, Square, and Co-founder, Twitter; Esther Dyson
Esther Dyson (born 14 July 1951) is a Swiss-born American investor, journalist, author, commentator and philanthropist. She is the executive founder of Wellville, a nonprofit project focused on improving equitable wellbeing. Dyson is also an ang ...
, Chairman, EDventure; Lawrence Lenihan, Founder, CEO and Managing Director of FirstMark Capital; Naveen Selvadurai
Naveen Selvadurai (born January 27, 1982) is an American internet entrepreneur and co-founder of location-based social networking site Foursquare.com. Until recently, he was working at startup studio Expa which was founded by co-founder of Uber a ...
, Co-founder, Foursquare; Steven Strauss, Managing Director, NYCEDC; Kara Swisher
Kara Anne Swisher ( ; born December 11, 1962) is an American journalist. She has covered the business of the internet since 1994. As of 2023, Swisher was a contributing editor at ''New York (magazine), New York Magazine'', the host of the podcast ...
, Co-Executive Director, All Things Digital; Fred Wilson, Managing Partner, Union Square Ventures
Union Square Ventures (USV) is an American venture capital firm based in New York City. The firm has backed more than 130 startups, including Twitter, Etsy, Stripe, Coinbase, Zynga, Tumblr, Stack Overflow, Meetup, Kickstarter, MongoDB, ...
.
References
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Further reading
* Alan Fever
The Mayor's Geek Squad
NY Times, March 23, 2013
* Erin Durkin
Mayor Michael Bloomberg employs innovative contest style to bring bright, new ideas to meet city challenges
NYDailyNews, February 10, 2013
* John Leland
Turning Unused Acres Green, NY Times
April 29, 2012
* Phyllis Furman
Mayor hands out prizes to local software developers who turn NYC data into easy-to-use apps
NYDailyNews, April 18, 2012
* Joshua Brustein
NY Times, March 2, 2012
* Joshua Brustein
NY Times, January 6, 2012
* Brad Stenger
"Scene Near Me" Hackers: From BigApps to TimesOpen
NY Times, November 21, 2011
* Brad Stenger
TimesOpen: Social Media on Nov 14
NY Times, November 4, 2011
* Joshua Brustein
NY Times, September 30, 2011
* Joshua Brustein
NY Times, April 29, 2011
* Patrick McGeehan
Bloomberg Announces Investment in Tech Start-Up
NY Times, May 25, 2010
* Associated Pres
Subway finder wins BigApps competition
NY Post, February 8, 2010
* Adam Lisberg
New award-winning phone app, Wayfinder NYC, points the (sub)way
NYDailyNews, February 5, 2010
* Jenna Wortham
New York City Names Winners of Apps Contest
NY Times, February 4, 2010
* Robert Johnson
Techies show off big app-etites for city info
NYDailyNews, December 28, 2009
* Sewell Chan
NY Times, October 7, 2009
* Sewell Chan
City Admits Lapse in Data Release
NY Times, October 7, 2009
* Emily S. Rueb
When Road Rage Turns Into a Brawl
NY Times, October 6, 2009
* Jenna Wortham
New York City Wants You to Create an App For That
NY Times, October 6, 2009
* Sewell Chan and Patrick MCgeehan
City Invites Software Developers to Crunch Big Data Sets
NY Times, June 29, 2009
External links
Official website
Competitions in New York City