Alaska News

Coming soon: People Mover smartphone app?

A weekend of computer wizardry in Anchorage may one day yield an app for your smartphone.

More than a dozen programmers and coders took part in a weekend "hackathon" recently sponsored by the Anchorage Economic and Development Corp. Their mission: create community-oriented civic mobile apps from open government data.

Four projects made it to the judges; the municipality was interested in two of them, according to a press release from AEDC.

The winner? People Mover. Anchorage's mass transit users may one day be using a mobile public transportation app that pulls data on People Mover buses and routes and presents it on a Google map to provide real-time traffic information and bus stops.

Runner-up was an app that helps people make career decisions based on job openings, wages and other statistics from Alaska Department of Labor employment information.

Craig Medred

Craig Medred is a former writer for the Anchorage Daily News, Alaska Dispatch and Alaska Dispatch News. He left the ADN in 2015.

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