NSW offers $100k prizes for application development

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In a surprise visit to today’s NSW Sphere event, Premier Nathan Rees announced the apps4nsw program — offering prizes of $100,000 for innovative applications with make use of government data for public good.

I’ve got a piece on the Crikey website, NSW gets its geek on:

“This is all about making government data easy for everyone to use to solve everyday problems,” said Rees…

Entries may be websites or web based services, mobile applications or stand-alone PC based or kiosk-based applications.

“The prizes will be judged by an expert panel – which doesn’t include me – and there will also be a People’s Choice Award and the opportunity for the best entry to go to a prototyping phase”, said Rees.

“Anything we develop as a result of the competition will be licensed as open source and freely available to government and the public. These will be public apps for the common good.”

This is a fascinating initiative. Have a squizz at the Crikey piece. I’ll write more later.