Announcing the New FTW Champion: Timothy Dalby!
The announcement we’ve all been waiting for has finally arrived, the winner of the 2010 FTW! Coding Competition is FindAHome by Timothy Dalby! 
Find-A-Home revolutionizes the way you search for a house, it uses an innovative decision engine that simplifies the process of finding a new home by automatically researching the area a house is located in and providing each home with a score based on a number of metrics. The engine uses a number of data sets, including the locations of City Parks, Schools, Bus Stops, Police Stations, Fire Stations, and Recreation Centers to build a ranking for each house. FindAHome makes extensive use of the Edmonton Opendata catalogue and proves what can be when more cities start to open up their data.
The Final showdown..
In the first round each finalist did a 10 minute presentation on their respective apps. Dressed as generals, each contestant pitched convincing arguments on why they should be the next FTW! champion. FindAHome stood out among the rest; it showed a clear purpose that would be useful to any home buyer and was currently available to the citizens of Edmonton. He had written the app by himself in only about o3 weeks, never even knowing what Open Data was before entering the competition. The second round commenced with counter questions by each contestant. Francois Mazzerole from project Tholus and Dashan Yue from Taxicity both defended their apps valiantly. However, when it came to round 3, the MWNW attendees decided that FindAHome was a champion among two other stellar apps, Taxicity and Project Tholus (Who came 2nd and 3rd). Timothy Dalby won the grand prize at MWNW, as well as the bonus prizes for using Open Data, Windows Azure and SQL services. Timothy took a home a total of $8K worth of Dell Prizes! Congratulations Timothy on becoming the FTW! Coding Competition Champion!
3 Comment
One thing I don’t understand.
To enter the competition, the app had to fall into one of three categories, yet to win, it should be in ALL three (according to the FTW page). So basically, the application could suck, but just because it uses all the possible technologies and the others don’t, it wins? Not much of a coding competition in my opinion.
“Find-A-Home revolutionizes”… It’s been done before oh so many times. Not much of a revolution there. It gets boring after the N-th copy. *yawn*
My 2 cents.
Really? Where?
So you’re annoyed that somebody followed the instructions and had the gall to do it well?
Bitter comments by ignorant people who like to hear themselves talk? It’s been done before oh so many times. Not much of a revolution there. It gets boring after the N-th copy. *yawn*
Nope, having it in all three increases your chance to win the bonus prizes. Apps that were submitted are judged on how innovative, useful and creative the app is. The judges (W3Quebec,DeblabMTL,MS) were all pretty unanimous in the final three, and the final three did not use ALL 3 the categories. The wining app, FindAHome, does do something creative enough with the Edmonton OpenData that managed to win over the attendees at MWNW.
Alot of open data apps i’ve seen serve very linear needs (Nearest bus, fire hydrants, toilets etc) But FindAHome actually helps you make a decision on something that’s pretty big for most people (Finding a home).It showcases a different approach to using Open data rather than pointing out the obvious. I’d like to see more of these kind of apps across Canada.
I will make a post highlighting some of the other awesome apps entered, and you’ll see they didn’t suck.
-Arun
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