5 Bing Map Apps for the Winter Olympics

The Microsoft Canada Development Centre recently ran a contest that challenged developers to create Bing Map applications for the upcoming 2010 Winter Olympics, taking place in Vancouver, Canada. The resulting apps are designed for use by Vancouver citizens and visitors during the Olympics and use the open data from the City of Vancouver, the MS Open Government Data Initiative (OGDI) and Windows Azure. After the contest is over, the source code for all the apps will be uploaded to Codeplex.

Here’s what the developers created:

1. MapWay - a way to find City of Vancouver facilities and Olympic events.
2. Free Finders – helps you find free events and services in Vancouver and uses a Facebook connection.
3. MoBuddy – enables you to hookup with friends and visitors during Olympics to plan and share experiences through mobile social networking including Facebook
4. eVanTivitY – enables you to find city and social events and lets you add-in user-defined data-feeds
5. Vancouver Parking – helps you plan and find the best parking spots when visiting Vancouver

You can see screenshots of all these apps over on the Bing blog here. (Pictured is the parking app, #5)