New York's Mayor Michael Bloomberg, along with his tech and digital teams, have challenged innovators to come up with a use for the city's 11,000 pay phones.
The Reinvent Payphones Design Challenge targets urban planners, technologists and policy experts. It aims to find data and design-inspired ideas to modernize the city's infrastructure, before the pay phones' contracts expire in 2014.
"From Wi-Fi in public spaces to the High Line, our Administration has continuously reinvented City infrastructure by matching innovative concepts with extraordinary designs," Bloomberg said at the New York Tech Meetup Tuesday evening.
Despite the decline of pay phones' importance with the rise of mobile phones, the city's pay phones are still useful during times of emergency, such as during Hurricane Sandy last month.
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