As if there weren't enough things to keep people glued to their iPhones instead of paying attention to real life. Now, New York City is encouraging programmers to mine raw data to come up with new ways for iPhone users to annoy their friends and seem like know-it-all assholes.
"On Tuesday, New York City is rolling out the next phase of its NYC Big Apps competition, an initiative that will supply local programmers and developers with a stockpile of raw municipal data sets to build applications for the Web and mobile phones," says the Times' Bits blog. "Contestants will have access to more than 170 data sets supplied by over 30 city agencies, including weekly traffic updates, schedules of citywide events, property sales, restaurant inspections and mappable data around school and voting districts."
Now if only someone could create a map of smug iPhone users so we could avoid them, well that would be bliss.
