Today iStrategyLabs becomes the proud father of Apps for Democracy!

You can download the full press release here.

The District of Columbia’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer (OCTO), in collaboration with iStrategyLabs, today announced the launch of the Apps for Democracy - “An Innovation Contest” for visualizing DC’s public data. The intention of this competition is to reward technology developers with cash prizes and public recognition for creating applications that are useful for the DC government and the citizens, visitors and businesses of Washington, DC.

The contest will serve as a catalyst to visualize OCTO’s data so it will be useful to the citizens of DC, improving their quality of life; foster innovation in the DC technology community resulting in startup formation and growth; solve the technology challenges of OCTO through more cost effective open collaboration; and work towards a new model for government/private sector cross collaboration that can be utilized repeatedly to solve OCTO’s challenges and serve as an example for other municipalities.

Apps for Democracy will feature 60 cash prizes from $2000 to $100 dollars for a total of $20,000 in prizes.

Developers and designers will compete by creating web applications, widgets, Google Maps-mashups (and other maps-mashups), iPhone apps, Facebook apps, and other digital utilities that visualize OCTO’s Data Catalog, which provides real-time data from multiple agencies to citizens - a catalyst ensuring agencies operate as more responsive, better performing organizations.

Who: This contest is open to everyone.
What: Submission guidelines, meet-up notifications and awards structure can be found at Apps for Democracy. Submission must be released as open source code.
When: The contest starts 10/13 and ends at 11:59pm on 11/12. The awards ceremony will take place on 11/13. A kick-off happy hour will be hosted on 10/16 and 4 open innovation labs will hosted each weekend leading up to the deadline enabling participants to find collaborators and to work onsite among their fellow technologists. A full Google Calendar can be found here. The official social media tag is #APPS08.

A full social media strategy is in place and you can engage your community here:

1. Facebook Group
2. Facebook Event for the Kickoff Happy Hour @ Local 16 in DC
3. http://twitter.com/apps08
4. http://apps08.ning.com
5. http://www.flickr.com/groups/apps08/
6. Grab the Widget!
7. And more…

Grab creative assets for articles/posts here.

Media Contact: Peter Corbett, 202-683-9980, peter@istrategylabs.com

Huge props to Scott McCaughey for leading design/dev on this! More about him in iStrategists section.

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iStrategyLabs exists to do two things: provide compelling interactive strategy/experiences for our clients, and to birth new ideas of all kinds. When an idea is good enough, it enters our labs where we combine strategy, capital and human resources in order to bring it to life.

Today we’re proud to announce the most recent graduate from our incubator: The Wired Ones - “A Lab for Digital Influencers”.

This is a physical environment with a strong digital backbone that we’ll be plugging into music festivals across the globe.

It will house Creation, Distribution, Socialization and Immersion areas for bloggers, sponsors, artists, and talent to interact and explore the last and greatest in music related technology.

The first of these locations may include (pending final negotiations) Lollapalooza, All Points West, Austin City Limits, Bonnaroo, South By South West Music and others.

For Bloggers:

You will be given exclusive access to venues, artists and equipment allowing you easily produce compelling content for your audiences. If you are interested in joining The Wired Ones as a participating blogger, please fill out the form at the end of this post. This space is YOURS and we look forward to bringing you together with your fellow media makers.

For Sponsors:

This space will provide sponsors with the ability to engage digital influencers through product demonstrations and other programming live in a music festival atmosphere. We will coordinate all aspects of production and brand activation. Bloggers, vloggers, web celebs, musicians and festival attendees will coexist in this space and may find compelling ways to utilizes your products and services as they generate media of interest to their audiences. Please use the form below to contact us so we can send you a full sponsors opportunities presentation with associated pricing.

For Festival Producers:

The Wired Ones seeks to bridge the gap between live music events, social media creation and experiential activations to generate greater reach to an international online audience of interested consumers. Through pre-show, during-show and post show media asset creation you’ll see clearly how The Wired Ones is the right digital bridge between the online and offline worlds. Please use the form below if we haven’t already spoken with you.

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You may have seen some of the hullabaloo that took place at GEICO’s iheartcavemen.com launch party at SXSW, but did you catch the paparazzi style videos that have garnered 100,000+ views on Viddler? If not, take a peek at the following, you might be interest to see what all the hubbub is about:

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