FutureEverything and Transport for Greater Manchester present Routes to the Future: An Innovation Challenge, an intensive 48 hour competition aimed at coders and creative software developers to build new, useful applications from TfGM’s data that will improve the public transport experience for people of Greater Manchester. There are cash and development prizes available for the best ideas.
Being held as part of the FutureEverything Summit of Ideas and Digital Invention, the weekend will be held at Four Piccadilly Place and will begin straight after the main FutureEverything conference ends with a launch event from 6pm – 7.30pm on Friday 22 March. The innovation challenge itself will begin at 8am on Saturday 23 March.
Routes to the future is set to be an intense, productive and exciting collaboration between the brightest minds in software development and data processing. Entries from both teams and individuals are welcome. The cash prize and development fund available is over £16,000.
Challenge Categories are:
Best use of real-time data
Best use of multiple datasets
Best application created on the CitySDK API
Most Innovative use of data
Best U21 application
Developers Prize
Amongst the datasets TfGM will make available will be GTFS schedules and realtime Centreline positional information as well as the data already available through the DataGM – The Greater Manchester Datastore.
The Routes to the Future Innovation Challenge follows the very successful Manchester Hackathon, which was organised by FutureEverything, held in November 2012 at which 16 teams took part. The grand prize of £4600 was won by Data Crossfader, created by James Rutherford and Ashley Herriott, a visualisation tool that plots information on a map of Manchester to allow people to compare important sets of data.
The interest in the Innovation Challenge has been substantial and is now sold out. Further details about the results of the event will be blogged about here following FutureEverything.
FutureEverything Summit of Ideas and Digital Invention is taking place from Thursday 21 – Sunday 24 March. Delegate passes for the conference are on sale now. Passes are available at futureeverything.org