Monday, December 14, 2009

Mashup Australia Contest Winners

Thanks to Australian blog All Things Spatial, Google Maps Mania has been able to have a close look at the numerous Google Maps mashups entered into the Mashup Australia Contest. The overall winners of the competition were announced today and will receive $10,000 in prize money.

The winners are Suburban Trends and Know Where You Live, both of which use the Google Maps API.

Here's what the judges had to say about the winning entries:

Suburban Trends


“Suburban Trends (is) a mashup of different types of crime and census data that allows (users) to compare and contrast suburbs by a range of economic, education, safety and socio-economic indicators. The judges thought the ability to compare suburbs visually combined with the selective choice of statistics was excellent especially in a field dominated by many entries using similar datasets.“

Know Where You Live

"This entry bills itself as a prototype of a mashup of a range of open access government data based on postcodes so that you can truly know where you live. The judges loved the very citizen-centric ‘common questions’ user experience of this app and the groovy, and again, selective repackaging of what could otherwise be considered (we’ll be honest here) slightly boring data.

The integration of publicly-held historical photographs and rental price data was a nice touch as was the use of Google’s satellite images in the header. Judges were disappointed that some of the data for states other than NSW wasn’t available for inclusion. The focus on compliance only with the most modern standards compliant browsers was not seen as detrimental to this mashup."


Highly Commendable Mashup
award and $5,000 in prizes went to geo2gov (an online service that accepts location information in a variety of formats, like address, postcode, lat/lon, IP address, and returns data on that locations as JSON feed) and Firemash (mashup of relevant twits and New South Wales’ Rural Fire Service RSS feeds; it sends twitter alerts for registered users if fires are reported in the vicinity).

Notable Mashing Achievements ($2,500 prize) were awarded to:
Best Student Entry and $2,000 in prize money was awarded to Suburban Trends (yes, again) and Suburb Matchmaker

People’s Choice Award and $2,000 in prize money went to In Their Honour, with the following citation: “The clear winner of the People’s Choice Award was In Their Honour — which is consistent with the judge’s thoughts on its usability. As commenter Nerida Deane said, ‘I just looked up my Great Uncle Al and found the site easy to use and I liked the information it gave me. Maybe one day I’ll have a chance to visit his memorial.’

Student Entry — Commendable Effort ($1,000 prize):
Transformation Challenge ($1,000 bonus prizes for mashups which enhanced and/or made the provided data available for reuse programmatically):
Via: All Things Spatial
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