Notes from the Location-Based Services Seminar / Sausage Party

My more technically-inclined readers might want to check out my entry in The Farm titled Notes from the Bell Mobility/ESRI Location-Based Services Seminar, Part 1. It’s the first of a series of notes I took at a seminar aimed at developers who want to develop location-based applications for mobile devices such as cellphones.

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Of course, all this location-based services hoo-hah isn’t worth anything without an actual application for them. Here’s mine.

On the Saturday of Canadian Thanksgiving weekend 2004 — shortly after Wendy and I became engaged — I told her I’d show her what I was rescuing her from and took her to the “clubland” area of Accordion City (the Richmond/Adelaide “meet market” part of town). A small group of us took Wendy out on the town.

For some reason, the male-female ratio was completely off-kilter that night: it seemed as though men outnumbered women 9-to-1 that night. I remember laughing at a remark made by a guy walking past us, who complained to his friend: “It’s all dick!“

Over drinks, we joked that if services like TorontoGasPrices.com existed, there should also be one that reported the male/female ratio at various “meet market” clubs. You probably couldn’t rely on the clubs to report honestly, but you might be able to rely on mobile tracking of people’s cellphones. Participants using this social software would tell the app “I am of gender X seeking gender Y”, and their location would be checked every 30 minutes. People who want to meet people would probably be a more reliable source of information than clubs who simply want to fill their space.

The working title for my application? Sausage Party.