This summer Microsoft held a competition to promote and popularize its Bing Maps developer SDK and Map Apps. I was privileged to be one of the three judges who reviewed the finalists and voted on them across a range of criteria. The other two judges were Josh Lowensohn from CNET and Joe Francica from Directions Magazine.
The three top vote recipients out of a list of 8 finalists were:
Finalists were judged on the basis of creativity, usefulness and visual appeal.
Taxi Fare Calculator, a very practical app that calculates the cost of getting from A to B in numerous cities, was the overall winner. In order to see or use it you need to have Silverlight installed.
My belief is that Microsoft has something very useful and “cool” on its hands with Map Apps but, unfortunately, most people don’t know about them. The company needs to do more to expose and promote Map Apps to the public. Hopefully this contest will continue into the future.
Related Topics: Microsoft: Bing | Microsoft: Bing Maps & Local | Microsoft: Bing Mobile
Alas, Microsoft Silverlight does not support my AMD Athlon 1.01 Ghz processor, so therefore I (and probably lots of others) cannot experience Bing Maps in the manner described in the article.
Perhaps making Silverlight available to everyone would help “…to do more to expose and promote Map Apps to the public.”