Tech Competition // NYC BigApps 3.0 Invites You To Build Apps That Improve City Life

With New York City's tech community getting some much-deserved attention through the Cornell tech campus planned for Roosevelt Island and the recent protest of SOPA and PIPA, we wanted to make sure all of you Silicon Alley fans are aware of an awesome competition that brings together NYC and technology.

NYC BigApps 3.0 invites software developers to create apps that use city data to improve the NYC experience. As the name suggests, the competition in its third year, with past winners such as the Roadify iPhone App, which employs user-submitted data and official transit data to give users alerts on subway, bus and driving conditions, and Big Apple Ed, a online guide to NYC public schools.

This year's competition will award $50,000 in prizes, including $10,000 and a chance to present their app at one of NY Tech Meetup's popular gathers going to the Best Overall Application.

If you'd like to enter, then you better get coding. The deadline for submissions, January 25, is less than a week away. Some submissions are already in, and you can check out videos, images and descriptions here.

So programmers of NYC (many of whom we happen to know here at 3rd Ward), let's show the city what you've got.

-- John Ruscher

WATCH THIS NOW // Douglas Rushkoff On The Importance Of Learning To Program

Still in search of a New Year's resolution? How about learning to program in one of our many different web design classes?

Why should you, you ask? Well, these days computer programming is a valuable and increasingly critical skill, not just for those who want to make a career out of it, but for anyone living in today's increasingly technology-oriented world. Author and media theorist Douglas Rushkoff laid out this argument in full in his 2010 book Program or be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age. He offers a shorter but no less enlightening version in this video of a talk that he gave at SXSW Interactive:

Inspired? Check out our wide selection of web design classes and sign up for the one that best fits your needs. It's 2012—be a programmer, not one of the programmed!

-- John Ruscher