I just read Dan's latest post on the Android Developers Blog. He breaks down the judging process they used, and I must admit, I'm very impressed. Earlier, I had mused about the logistical challenges of judging that many applications in such a short period of time. Although the protocol I cooked up was a bit different, I think Google did a really nice job. Buying all those laptops to make sure every application was judged on the same hardware running the same setup proved to me that they did everything they could to ensure a level playing field.
Jason Chen also posted the list of the top 50 winners. There are two in particular that I'd like to mention. The first is Pocket Journey, from Anthony Stevens. I had the pleasure of meeting Anthony at the first Android Campfire back in January. His application taps into an archive of nice audio tours that you can listen to as you roam about. The other is wikitude from Philipp Breuss. This particular app is very similar to GeoMata, especially since I bootstrapped GeoMata with wikipedia entries as well. There are a couple of subtle differences between our apps, GeoMata isn't intended to be wikipedia-centric, it utilizes content (including audio/video) from anywhere on the web. I also added a lot of emphasis on making it easy for users to add new content from the device. His interface and UI beats mine hands down though, he has several nice features that I didn't implement, like filtering by category.
Both of these apps are great examples the types of location based information services that I believe will be common place in the future. Looking at both of them really highlighted some glaring deficiencies in GeoMata that we need to fix for ADC 2. I think our app (and many others as well) needs real hardware to show it's potential. A mock GPS just isn't that exciting.
I plan on releasing the binary of GeoMata by the end of this week, I just have a couple of bugs to squash first. It's still nowhere near the application that I want it to be, but getting a little feedback now won't hurt.
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