So you’re in D.C. on business. After a long day of meetings, you’d like to go somewhere like the corner café back home. So you pull out your BlackBerry, fire up an application called CitySense, and bingo, it points you to the perfect little hip coffeehouse.
Citysense is an innovative mobile application for real-time nightlife discovery and social navigation, answering the question, "Where is everybody going right now?"
Citysense shows the overall activity level of the city, top activity hotspots, and places with unexpectedly high activity, all in real-time. Then it links to Yelp and Google to show what venues are operating at those locations. Citysense is a free demonstration of the Macrosense platform that everyone can enjoy.
The program, from New York–based Sense Networks, grew out of the concept of “reality mining,” in which cell phones and other devices collect data about people’s activities and interactions to shed light on human behavior. The concept was developed by Professor Alex Pentland at MIT’s Media Laboratory.
It uses real-time data to find places suited to your personal habits and filled with people with
similar tastes. Sense Networks is giving away the CitySense application to attract interest in the company and demonstrate its core technology: a set of machinelearning
algorithms designed to take location data gleaned from various sources—from cell phones to
taxicabs—and use it to detect the patterns of people’s behavior in a city. The hope is that those patterns will provide information on economic activity—where people are going and what they’re doing—that would be of interest to everyone from retailers to hedgefund
managers.
[Visit Citysense.com]