It is pretty cool to see what is happening right now in the UK when it comes to mashups and data. Show us a better way is a web site and competition that asks ethical hackers to come up with ideas to use a wide range of public data for the good of the public. Straight from the horse’s mouth this sounds like this:

The UK Government wants to hear your ideas for new products that could improve the way public information is communicated. The Power of Information Taskforce is running a competition on the Government’s behalf, and we have a 20,000 pound prize fund to develop the best ideas to the next level. You can see the type of thing we are are looking for here. 

To show they are serious, the Government is making available gigabytes of new or previously invisible public information especially for people to use in this competition.  Rest assured, this competition does not include personal information about people.

We’re confident that you’ll have more and better ideas than we ever will. You don’t have to have any technical knowledge, nor any money, just a good idea, and 5 minutes spare to enter the competition.

There is a vast amount of APIs available to play with so what stops you from giving it a whirl? My own idea, cabsharing is something I was actually planning to do for quite a time, maybe even as a start-up, but why not here?

Well, in a competition, not just directly. I like the idea of Sky News’ Developer Competition where they offer all in all £10k in prize money for widget and badge implementations of the content of their RSS feeds.

Talented developers can use the feeds to create their own applications. The brains with the best ideas will be invited to a Dragons’ Den-style judgment day at the Sky News studios.

A bit of a shame is that they haven’t got an API yet, but I pointed them to Yahoo! Pipes to offer developers as a workaround to use the RSS feeds in an easier manner.

The deadline is 30th of November and the Dragon’s Den shootout is on the 20th of December in the Sky offices. So if you want to have a go, get coding :) Make also sure you check the Terms and Conditions of the competition.