The competition will be hosted by ChallengePost, an online network for organizations and individuals to create and offer competitions. The launch of NYC BigApps will be also be officially announced at tonight's NY Tech Meetup. So, what's in it for developers? Read on.

"Last week, we launched the Connected City Initiative to put technology to use improving services and providing information to New Yorkers as fast and in as many ways as possible, and BigApps will be yet another," said Mayor Bloomberg.

"The information we're providing is the public's, and we're relying on the creativity and talent of New York City's tech and entrepreneurial communities to come up with innovative and helpful ways to use it. It's a great example of a 21st-century, public-private partnership."

The New York City Economic Development Corporation and the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications worked with around 30 agencies to provide more than 170 datasets for the competition. The data include geographic locations of all sidewalk cafés, laundry facilities, playgrounds, dog runs, city landmarks, as well as census data, extensive property valuation and assessments, the results of restaurant inspections, lists of permitted citywide events, and even side parking and traffic updates.

Another important aspect of the competition is the expectation that official, city government support of startups will add a measure of vitality to an already vibrant local startup culture.

"Supporting entrepreneurs and startups is an important component of our five borough economic opportunity plan and the launch of the Big Apps competition does just that," said Deputy Mayor Lieber. "By partnering with the private sector to encourage innovative and forward-thinking applications, we are leveraging existing resources to increase efficiency and transparency in government, stimulate investment, and create jobs."

Apps will be judged based on their benefit to residents, visitors, and government; their originality; their visual appeal; their effect on data accessibility and government transparency; and yes, their commercial potential.

The NYC BigApps Competition is open to individuals, startups, and non-profit organizations with fewer than 50 employees. Datasets will be available for download today from the newly-created Data Mine.

Submissions will be judged by a panel that is to include NY Tech Meetup co-founder Dawn Barber, Betaworks CEO John Borthwick, Mahalo co-founder Jason Calacanis, EDVentures Founder Esther Dyson, FirstMark Capital CEO Lawrence Lenihan, AlleyCorp co-founder Kevin Ryan, DFJ Gotham Ventures managing partner Danny Schultz, and Union Square Ventures managing general partner Fred Wilson.

To kick off the launch of WorldSings, the company is launching their annual contest which is open to any musician or band performing original music. After creating a profile and uploading content, artists can participate in the contest while also growing their fan base through traditional social networking. On WorldSings, artists are expected to interact directly with fans via wall posts, chat, and direct messages.

Artists also get to know who exactly their fans are as WorldSings plans on sharing key demographic information regarding fans' age, gender, location, etc.

About the Competition

The World's Best Song competition, an effort to expand people's musical knowledge, is somewhat like a cross between an American Idol-type competition (or any of its overseas counterparts) and the Eurovision Song Contest, a popular European contest and one of the longest-running TV shows in the world. On WorldSings, fans will vote for their favorite songs throughout the year and on March 19th, 2010, the top 20 vote getters will fly to Las Vegas, Nevada to compete in a live competition at Planet Hollywood. The winner of the competition will receive $500,000 and the title of World's Best Song. The other $500,000 will be divvied up among the other 19 finalists.  Music fans have an opportunity to win, too. They can compete for prizes during the year including the grand prize - an opportunity to fly to Vegas to see the top artists perform.

Without the competition aspect to WorldSings, the social network would just be too much like MySpace Music to be of interest to anyone but the most serious of music aficionados. However, the contest could actually be a big draw for this new music destination site. Don't believe us? Just look at the millions of viewers tuning into American Idol and Eurovision's Song Contest.

WorldSings will officially launch during SXSW on Friday, but it opens to the public today.

In addition to offering value adds like traffic data, search by semantic or natural language meaning is an option for search that's widely discussed. Social search is yet another. Researchers at Stanford posted an interesting study this week on the role social bookmarking could play in augmenting search.

On Google

I find myself consistently impressed with a lot of what Google does but the fact remains that Google web search isn't changing much. They are folding all the various search engines into one, but the experience isn't changing dramatically. Does it need to? Check out this rant below from Doc Searls, on recent episode of the excellent NewsGang Podcast. Searls calls Google, "the Windows of search."

I think Google is vulnerable in search. Google hasn't changed search in 7 or 8 years, they are fat and happy. There are so many ways search can be improved. Google is way too locked into Larry and Sergey's original vision, which has hardly changed at all; it's not the only cannonical way to do search. There's so many ways to granulate search and make it conditional and do a much better job. Google's search is lame in a lot of ways, it's very minimal - it's just become common but that doesn't mean it's perfect. It is the Windows of search.

There's a huge vulnerability there. I was talking to someone who used to work at Google who said that the reason Google Blogsearch has been moribund for years...is because Larry thinks that Google ought to have one search experience and that search experience should never change. Since Larry wants it that way, Google Blogsearch is just sitting there and may actually go away. It's inexcusable, I don't care how much research they are doing - they are blowing smoke up their own ass if they think that there is only one good experience we can have with search. It is not enough. There is enormous room for other people to compete with that...Get out of your shell where you think the whole world is these companies and what they bring to the table now.

Ask's integration with Compete is just one small example of what's possible. Searls doesn't take into consideration Google's mindshare in the passage above but I agree with the basic premise that some major new feature, algorithm or user experience could prove very compelling for searchers at large. Here at the ReadWriteWeb network, we've got a whole blog about alternative search engines.

Google isn't the most lovable brand in the world and no one can be the coolest cat in school forever.