GeoVation Challenge and NYC’s BigApps Competition

A couple of great competitions for innovative ideas and applications are going on right now, the GeoVation Ideas Challenge and GeoVation Awards Programme in the UK and New York City’s BigApps Competition, and you can participate! For the GeoVation Ideas Challenge (GeoVation was founded and is currently supported by the Ordnance Survey), you simply sign up at the GeoVation website, and submit a cool idea for using geography. If your idea is picked as one of the best, you can win a tour of the Ordnance Survey’s office in Southampton, UK. You can also participate by helping to rate the ideas submitted.

The GeoVation Awards Programme is a competition for ventures that use geography in new and innovative ways, and is open to UK residents 18 and over. It’s a little more involved than the Ideas Challenge, and entrants will need to provide a more detailed proposal for their venture idea. Entries must be submitted to the GeoVation website by January 4, 2010, and “a shortlist of up to 10 finalists who will be invited to present at the Show Case event, that will be held January 26th at the Royal Geographic Society in London. At the event finalists will be asked to present to and answer questions from the judges and assembled audience, for the opportunity to win one of four prizes. First prize is £10,000, two runner-up prizes of £5,000 and a community choice award, voted by the audience, of £1,000.”

Over on this side of the pond, New York City is sponsoring the NYC BigApps Competition, “which will reward the developers of the most useful, inventive, appealing, effective, and commercially viable applications for delivering information from the City of New York’s NYC.gov Data Mine to interested users.” Although this competition is not restricted to geospatial apps, many of the 85 entries are location-based or mapping apps, such as NYC BigMaps and PrimoSpot to name just two. Application submissions ended on December 8th, but you can still participate by voting for your favorite application between now and January 7, 2010.