A $500,000 first prize is being offered to software developers by the creators of the new Satori live data platform to encourage imaginative and ground-breaking uses for apps that use live-streamed data to provide information to a wide range of consumers, travelers, business people and other users. Satori, according to its creators, is all about getting all the world's public open data into one place so it can be used more efficiently.
The contest was unveiled by MZ, which was formerly known as MachineZone, to promote its newly-launched Satori live open data platform, which so far is bringing together more than five million RSS feeds around the world to offer live, streaming data feeds for use by apps and developers.
The Satori $1,000,000 Live Open Data Challenge, which was announced April 4, also includes a second prize of $250,000, a third prize of $100,000 and 10 honorable mentions of $15,000 each, according to the event's organizers. The contest will be open for 90 days and aims to highlight Satori's use as a platform to coalesce the world's open data into streaming live data that is continuously available for developers anywhere for free.
The cash prizes will be awarded to developers who combine newly-published and existing data on the platform to create the "Most Impactful Live Open Data Channel," according to MZ. The winning entrants will create channels "that showcase the speed and scale of the platform, have the potential to positively impact people's lives, are scalable, and are built for widespread use," according to the contest rules. Those channels will then be available for free to anyone in the world to use for the creation of apps. Access to Satori is free for developers and publishers.
Gabe Leydon, a co-founder and CEO at MZ, told ITPro.com that Satori doesn't save any of the data but brings it together into one immense stream so it can be used by developers to create new kinds of applications that can utilize all kinds of data at once to do more for users.
"Because we're not saving everything, we can compute everything," said Leydon. "That's the power of Satori," which is a stateless service that doesn't use a database. "We only compute what's live in the network."
Essentially, Satori cuts out the need to subscribe to multiple RSS feeds on any topic and allows developers and others to gain access to the live data in one easy-to-get stream, said Leydon.
"If you wanted to monitor the world's news in real time this is the only way to do it," he said. "There is no other site that aggregates all of the world's news in a single string of data. This is real internet infrastructure. This is really big for the internet."
Using Satori, developers can write logic and rules on that stream of information which lets them extract information or look at the data in unique ways, said Leydon. Included are artificial intelligence (AI) functions which can make decisions based on decisions in the stream. For example, developers can write a rule which will send an alert every time the stream finds a specific search term in it.
The contest was born to help showcase Satori's unique capabilities, said Leydon. "What we are looking for, because it is such a new way to look at data, is for innovative [ideas] to take large streams of data and make apps with it."
One of the examples of the use of Satori is the creation of apps that provide real time details on the wide-ranging transportation system in New Zealand, that will eventually tie in everything from trains to buses to taxis and more. So far, the bus system in Auckland, New Zealand, is using Satori to create a single command center with 360-degree live insights into the city's fleet of 3,000 buses, including ticket sales, routes, schedules, and more. Satori moved all of that data into a single stream for the Auckland Transport agency and it is now being used to give city bus system operators ubiquitous insights into all live data from every bus as it is streaming. It also provides new ways to analyze and plan bus routes and experiment with new ideas such as dynamic pricing.
As more cities and countries around the world conduct similar efforts, eventually there could be apps that provide access to the world's public transportation systems in one place, in real time, said Leydon.
One problem today is that the world's open data exists on thousands of siloed websites, keeping it separate from each other until it is manually brought together, said Leydon. By bringing it together through Satori, it will make it easier for developers and open data publishers to realize the full potential of public data, he added.
"The goal is to put all the world's real time information into one place because it simplifies it," said Leydon. "For open data publishers, its like a gigantic switchboard for any type of information."
