This is pretty neat: the City of Ottawa has created an iPhone app with information on events and activities ongoing in the city. Versions for Android and BlackBerry are forthcoming, later this year.
Having a lot of this kind of information centralized in one place seems useful, particularly in a form tailored to be accessible from smartphones.
Author: Milan
In the spring of 2005, I graduated from the University of British Columbia with a degree in International Relations and a general focus in the area of environmental politics. In the fall of 2005, I began reading for an M.Phil in IR at Wadham College, Oxford.
Outside school, I am very interested in photography, writing, and the outdoors. I am writing this blog to keep in touch with friends and family around the world, provide a more personal view of graduate student life in Oxford, and pass on some lessons I've learned here.
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Ottawa Tourism (partner of Apartment613) launched their Discover Ottawa iPhone application today at an event at City Hall. You can create custom Ottawa postcards for your friends, find out details of Ottawa attractions and explore photo and video galleries. You can also check flights in and out of the city. So far the reviews on iTunes seem good and please feel free to add your comments below if you instal this on your phone.
To spur on innovation around their new open data initiative the city recently held a competition for smartphone apps.
Submissions are at http://apps4ottawa.ca
The winner was a very neat “pocket tourguide” sort of app mentioned in that citizen article that used geolocation of your smartphone photo to link to information about landmarks on wikipedia and had a google streetview map for other points of interest.
The runner up was a realtime bus schedule app that estimated a bus’ time of arrival at any stop based on the current location of the bus using gps data from on the bus. Also very neat until they turned off the bus gps data feed in the hopes of monetizing it with their own ad filled app.