Being yet a Blackberry kind of guy, I have little experience with the iPhone, but so far I have heard nothing but excited exclamations of “cool” from folks who do use Apple’s ubiquitous device when they see a new application developed for it by the Sunlight Foundation’s Sunlight Lab. It’s an Augmented Reality Mashup of stimulus spending data from recovery.gov.
What is so cool about it? Well, let’s say you are walking down the street, iPhone 3GS (or Android) in hand in downtown Pittsburgh, arguing with your best buddy from Philly about which town got the most stimulus spending. If you’ve downloaded the app from Sunlight, you can do a search for either “recovery” or “sunlight” and it displays waypoints for all stimulus projects in the area where you happen to be standing. Click on the waypoint and you get the data about the particular project.
There are some limited sorting capabilities with this mashup. Go here for more info. And by the way, if you are walking down the street, any street, arguing with a buddy/enemy/stranger/in-law/whatever about whose town got more stimulus spending, you are probably seriously in need of a vacation.
