WWDC: Location-Aware iPhone Tools Set to Flood the Web
If the rumors are to be believed, Apple is going to announce new iPhones — possibly GPS-enabled iPhones — at the company’s WWDC event, set to kick off later today.
It’s the sort of news that has GPS manufacturers quaking in their boots, but for iPhone fans it could mean access to all kinds of useful, location-aware data. One interesting possibility is a new service by the name of CitySense.
CitySense attempts to show you what parts of your city are most active right now. The data is pulled from geo tracking devices inside taxis, though the company is looking into other ways of gathering data — like from your iPhone.
CitySense is currently only available to Blackberry customers, though the site is advertising a “coming soon to the iPhone” service. The other downside is that CitySense only supports San Francisco at the moment, though six other cities are reportedly in the works.
So what does CitySense do? Essentially the plan is track users (with privacy options to delete your data) and then map that data in real-time so you can find people like you. CitySense’s research has found that there are seven basic types of users and that those users follow patterns that remain constant across cities.
Here’s how SenseNetworks, the company behind CitySense, explains the data:
For example: rock clubs and hip-hop clubs each retain distinct tribal distributions. When a user is out at night, Citysense learns their preferred tribe distribution from time spent in these places. When that user visits another city, they see hotspots recommended on the basis of this distribution and combined with overall activity information.
In other words, say you like hanging out in indie rock clubs. Now say you’re on vacation in another city and want to see a show. Fire up CitySense and look for the hotspots to find out where the rock clubs are.
To get a better idea of what it looks like check out the Processing-based demo on the SenseNetworks site.
Or of course you could just pick up the local weekly rag and look for an interesting show — but who reads newspapers anymore?
[via O’Reilly Radar]
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