Apps for Californians: The Winners

Romin Irani, September 27th, 2010

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Apps for Californians has announced its winners. The CA.gov-promoted mashup competition launched in June was a collaboration with Google, Microsoft, Center for Digital Government and ProgrammableWeb. There are five winners and two People’s Choice Winners.

You can see all the submissions at CA.gov, or listed in our directory under Apps for Californians mashups. Five winners were chosen by the judges. They are:

• California Cage Fight : This mashup allows you to compare your county with other California counties and the state as a whole. You can compare population growth, per capita income, unemployment, new houses and more.

• California Environment Report: This mashup provides an Interactive map, heatmaps, a geo-location mobile version, data feeds, and detail pages of every Cleanup Site and Permitted Facility from the CA Department of Toxic Substances Control Data sets.

• California View: A mashup that provides you information on State Parks, Fishing Spots and Boating facilities based on a location.

• DataCalifornia: It provides information on education (schools/colleges), health (Hospital List) and legislation (current bills). On its front page, it aggregates Twitter feeds categorized by politics, police/fire department and schools. It also provides citizens for a way to report civic problems in their area.

• ZonabilitySF: This website provides San Francisco zoning ordinance information on the go! Give it a location and it lets you know the zone details and related information on it.

The People’s Choice winners were California Cage Fight and Explore California (a finalist), which allows users to navigate to California counties through an interactive map and see the trends of population, income, unemployment, new housing units, etc.over a number of past years.

Apps for Californians invited developers to create mashups based on over 400 data sources and 100 million records of data that the State of California has made available via various data formats. California has taken a great initiative in opening up its data for citizens to build applications that both help the government agencies and its residents. We believe this is just the beginning of a process that allows for citizens to participate in bringing about change. Another initiative, the Challenge.gov portal that we covered recently also invites developers to solve challenges across different government agencies.