Mayor Bloomberg Endorses My City Way

Mayor Bloomberg showed up at TechCrunch Disrupt unannounced to share an important contest for NYC and Silicon Alley. Bloomberg will be giving My City Way $300,000 in funding to support development MCW’s travel discovery platform. My City Way provides a simple way to access different categories of venues throughout the city. This includes dining, nightlife, safety, transit, hotels, and more. Their flagship product is the NYC Way application for iPhone/iPod and Android. It won three awards at Mayor Bloomberg’s NYC BigApps Competition and has been downloaded over 300,000 times on iTunes.

My City Way was named a Top 5 travel application by Fox News. It serves as a “location-aware guidebook” that will soon be available not only in NYC, but in over 40 cities around the world. Each city-specific guide is like “50 hyper-local apps rolled into one.” Rather than simply touring a city and checking in at the places you visit, My City Way will help you figure out where you want to go in the first place. It has been tailored for use by tourists and locals, turning your mobile device into a city discovery gateway.

DataRockit, a sponsor of the TechCrunch event, is the leader in data services technologies and powers some of the largest online information applications in the world. Their database holds about 3.1 billion current records related to consumer, criminal, sex-offender, and real estate data. DataRockit opened up their database to developers, posing the challenge to to come up with ways to create safety for communities. My City Way took on the challenge and attempted to incorporate the data sets into their application during the hack a day overnight event this past weekend.

When it came down to the wire, they were not able to integrate everything, but the founder plans to continue the work they began. This data will be included in both their iPhone and iPad apps to provide features related to consumer issues, crime within the city, real estate and sex offenders within the city.

The contest terms are as follows:

  • Contestants can be individuals or teams
  • No cost to enter and no purchase required
  • Proposals must include:
  1. Full description of application, its uses, capabilities and function
  2. Wireframes or mock-ups
  3. At least 2 potential user scenarios
  4. Proposals must be sent to disrupt@datarockit.net by June 7, 2010

The winning proposal will be announced on June 14, 2010, the final day of New York’s Internet Week. At that time, the selected individual or team will have until September 1, 2010 to fully build out a prototype model of their application. The partnership between DataRockit and the winning application will include:

  • Data necessary to run the application
  • Data infrastructure and hosting servers
  • Developer support and access to DataRockit’s development team