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FCC Pays $100K To Open Source Apps Challenge Winner
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."
It was an android app for women's health issues. Specifically, how to shave or wax your pussy. The best part is that you could automatically upload before/after pics and share with your friends. Maybe women don't use android?
Certainly more useful than this bus thing.
It's fine to play around on the bleeding edge, but here's a message about relevance:
When low tech works, use it.
Parity: What to do when the weekend comes.
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.