Imity
Let’s say you’re at a conference in a strange town and you walk into the break room to get some coffee. You see a few familiar faces, but you can’t remember any of the names that go with those faces. You ask yourself, “Where did I last see that guy? Have I actually met him before? Didn’t we talk over email?”
Then you pull out your Bluetooth device and fire up imity. You can see who’s in the room with you — as long as they have some sort of wirelessly connected phone, PDA or laptop — plus the time and date you were last in a room with them, how often and where you’ve seen them in the past few months, whether you’ve ever called them, emailed them, visited their blog, and so on.
Imity is a product that takes “where” data and adds “when” data. Claus Dahl, who gave the imity demo, began his presentation with a riff on the differences between “place” and “space.” According to Claus, the place is the thing that happens within a space. A space is useless without a time reference — for example, the activity inside a pub is totally different at 8AM than it is at 11PM. Claus extended this idea by stating that geodata becomes much more rich and interesting when time is factored in. Your location (the space) is defined by what you’re doing there and when (the place).
Imity isn’t strictly a Bluetooth mobile application. There’s also a web component where users can share more information about themselves. In the mobile sphere, however, imity is like a glorified exchange of business cards. The tool logs your social life for you, keeping track of who you meet, where and when.
Imity users who are connected at the same time in different locations can share data, too. Your friends can send you the “place” profile of a location so you can see who’s there (and who’s there that you know) before you go through the trouble of actually going there.
