NARA's Foursquare mobile app coming to NYC, and World Bank names app contest winners
The National Archives and Records Administration is expanding its popular augmented reality mobile application to New York City this month, and the World Bank just announced the winners of its global application contest.
Get ready, New York City. The National Archives and Records Administration is bringing its Foursquare mobile application your way this month.
The NARA/Foursquare project can be accessed through Foursquare’s mobile application or a Web browser. It allows users who check in with Foursquare at a NARA location to obtain tips with additional information about the location.
For example, users who check in at the Washington Monument can see a historical photograph of the monument. Users who check in at the U.S. Supreme Court building can see a video.
To date, the program has distributed nearly 100 tips. Its most popular check-in site — NARA's headquarters in Washington — has had nearly 3,000 check-ins from Foursquare, said Jill James, NARA’s social media manager.
NARA’s development costs for the mobile application were about 120 hours in staff time, James said. Foursquare is providing a brand page to NARA for free, she added.
In April, NARA is rolling out more than a dozen tips for locations in New York City, James said.
“We are having fun with it and getting good feedback,” she added.
In other Gov 2.0 news, users can compare country-by-country poverty rates, health care, education and other indicators with winning software applications developed for the World Bank’s Apps for Development contest.
The contest drew 107 entries from 36 countries to meet the challenge of creating digital applications that highlight the bank’s data. The three top-rated applications were from Australia, France and Germany. The winners were announced April 14.
By allowing visualizations and analysis, the World Bank hoped the competition would stimulate innovation in dealing with global problems.
“These apps clearly demonstrate how the software development community can harness technology to analyze and tackle some of the world's long-standing problems,” World Bank Group President Robert Zoellick said.
The judges included Kannan Pashupathy of Google, Ory Okolloh of Ushahidi, and Craig Newmark of Craigslist. A total of $55,000 was awarded in cash to competition winners.
Read more about the winners here.