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FCC Pays $100K To Open Source Apps Challenge Winner

Posted by Soulskill on from the uncle-sam-wants-his-own-app-store dept.

coondoggie writes "The challenge: develop useful, localized open source apps that make local public information more personalized and usable. With that idea as the backdrop, the Federal Communications Commission and the Knight Foundation today awarded Code for America developer Ryan Resella the $30,000 Apps for Communities Challenge grand prize. Resella won for his YAKB.us app, a real time bus notification system for bus riders without a smartphone. Rasella developed an app that uses voice and SMS to deliver arrival times in English and Spanish."

3 of 15 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Damn, they didn't like mine :( by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

    Just one question, does the developer retain copyright to all images produced by this app?

  2. Not really original by snsh · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I saw the exact same thing proposed at a recent CityCamp event. And it didn't win any prize.

    The next-bus problem has been beaten to death. Smartphone and dumbphone solutions to the problem are everywhere. What's missing is the infrastructure in local transit systems needed to publish the real time data. Twenty-five year olds often don't realize that the lack of publicly available data is what is holding up next-bus apps from coming to their neighborhood, so they end up reinventing the wheel developing yet another next-bus app.

    1. Re:Not really original by stephanruby · · Score: 3, Insightful

      It's not the idea that's important, it's the execution that matters.

      For proof of this, just take a look at any public transportation app in the Market/App store for your area. In my area, there are many apps that deal with the BART transportation system for instance, and yet if you read the user reviews of those same apps in their respective app stores/market, none of the users believe that any of those apps are equivalent in terms of functionality/usability.

      And if your area doesn't publish reliable next-bus information publicly, then any extra work you do crowdsourcing/collecting the data, correcting/massaging the data, and updating it at different intervals, will help you differentiate the quality of your app vs. the quality of the app of your competitors.