MapForums

All eyes will be watching Vancouver in the next couple weeks since the 2010 Winter Olympics roll into town. For those of you who won’t just be watching, but instead living the Olympics the Microsoft Canada Development Centre published a contest challenging developers to create interesting applications featuring the Bing Maps Platform and below are the resulting, quite helpful visitor applications.

The Apps were developed by Developers at the Microsoft Canada Development Centre (MCDC) in Richmond, Vancouver.  They are developing these apps in their ‘spare time’ as an initiative to get them more engaged with the local developer community.  These apps will be ‘launched’ in early Feb and targeted at citizens and visitors during the Olympics. The apps utilize open data from the City of Vancouver (http://data.vancouver.ca) and platformed using the MS Open Government Data Initiative (OGDI) and Windows Azure – making them true cloud computing apps.  All source code will be placed in Codeplex for shared use after the contest has finished.

MapWay (Xinyang Qiu)- a way to find City of Vancouver facilities and Olympic events.

Free Finders (Avi Brenner) – helps you to find free events and services in Vancouver with Facebook connection.

MoBuddy (Thomas Wei) – enables you to hookup with friends and visitors during Olympics to plan and share experiences through mobile social networking including Facebook

eVanTivitY (Johannes Stockmann) – enables you to find City and social events and add-in user-defined data-feeds

Vancouver Parking (Igor Babichev) – helps plan and find the best parking spot for visiting Vancouver

Of note, we did recently update the aerial photography of Vancouver (amazing) and added Streetside photography for Vancouver up through Whistler (really amazing). For those of you going, I hope you enjoy your time up the Sea to Sky highway. Also, congratulations to Thomas Wei for taking home the gold in the competition.

CP – Follow me on Twitter @ChrisPendleton