How To Cash In On Government As A Platform

At TechCrunch Disrupt New York , the White House’s chief geeks — CTO Todd Park and CIO Steve Van Roekel — rang the bell for Silicon Valley to step up and help recode the federal government with their Digital Government Strategy. They hammered home the need for developers to leverage the mountains of open data coming out of the government to create new services and products for consumers.

But you shouldn’t do this just for fun, or even out of a sense of civic duty: you should do it because there’s money there — lots of it. You hear a lot about government going broke and not having money (which they are and that’s true), but what’s often lost in the debates about budget reduction and spending is the magnitude of the market. First consider the iOS apps market, which developers are always clamoring at: it prices out at roughly $2 Billion annually . Or take the entire video games industry, which includes not only software but hardware too: $16 Billion.

Now back to government. Last year alone, federal , state , and local governments in the United States spent over $140 Billion just on technology. And the kicker is this: the tech sucks...