Archive for the ‘links’ Category

Stanza Artwork. Shanghai 2004.

Here is the sales pitch from citysense. A system for gathering and representing real time city data from San Francisco. A nice idea for a company.
Quoted.
Citysense is an innovative mobile application for local nightlife discovery and social navigation, answering the question, “Where is everybody?”

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.

Instead, it evolves searching to sensing. Citysense passively “senses” the most popular places based on actual real-time activity and displays a live heat map.
Location data is everywhere. Cars, buses, taxis, mobile phones, cameras, and personal navigation devices all beacon their locations thanks to network-connected positioning technologies such as GPS, WiFi and cell tower triangulation. Millions of consumers and businesses use location-enabled devices for finding nearby services, locating friends & family, navigating, asset- and pet-tracking, dispatching, sports, games, and hobbies.

These forces have lowered the cost of technology, ignited interest in location-enabled services, and resulted in the generation of significant amounts of historical and real-time streaming location information. Sense Networks was founded on the idea that these datasets could provide remarkable real-time insight into aggregate human activity trends.

Macrosense employs patent-pending technology to learn from these large-scale patterns of movement, and to identify distinct classes of behaviors in specific contexts, called “tribes.”

Once it’s known which tribes are where, by sampling the distribution of tribes at any given place and time, it’s possible to understand what it means when a user is there at that place and time.

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.

Users who go to rock clubs see rock club hotspots, users who frequent hip-hop clubs see hip-hop hotspots, and those who go to both see both. The question “where is everybody like me right now?” is thus answered for these users – even in a city they’ve never visited before.

Citysense is an application that operates on the Sense Networks Macrosense platform, which analyzes massive amounts of aggregate, anonymous location data in real-time. Macrosense is already being used by business people for things like selecting store locations and understanding retail demand. But we asked ourselves: with all this real-time data, what else could we do for a city? Nightlife enhancement was the obvious answer. This release is just a test, and we’re interested in your feedback on how to make the application better. You’ll find a feedback button in Citysense.

Principles…

People should own their own data
People should have full control over the use of any data that they generate. All data collection should be “opt-in,” and users should be able to easily remove themselves and their data from the system without questions or hassle. The system doesn’t “remember” a user for later, but completely deletes data at the user’s discretion.

People should receive a meaningful benefit in exchange for sharing data
Meaningful benefits include compelling applications to help manage life better, or personalized services based on anonymous learning from “users like me.” People should be able to enjoy the benefits of these services simply in exchange for their data.

We’re looking for additional common good uses of aggregate, anonymous location data. If you would like to submit a project for consideration, please contact us at ….

http://www.citysense.com/home.php

All of the above ref their website.

From my Sensity projects.
Citysense…Sounds like sensity backwards….Various types of data can be re-imagined within the context of city space and the environment. This includes pollution data recorded via sensors in the street, to create audio acoustic files expressing the pain and suffering of the air as it pollutes. Weather and forecast data, acquired via weather station equipment; this can be used and can create ambient soundscapes and morphing visualizations as the wind shifts direction or the rain increases. Noise monitor levels, and noise maps , create a symphony of true urban sounds that can be used to make sound reactive sculptures. The patterns we make, the forces we weave, are all being networked into retrievable data structures that can be re-imagined and sourced for information. These patterns all disclose new ways of seeing the world. The value of information will be a new currency as power change. The central issue that will develop will be the privilege and access to these data sources….
I like their pitch about owning their own data, couldn’t agree more in fact all royalties should be shared. Its not just about privacy its about ownership. Once you enter the grid you body is now externally giving away data and information. Companies are now rushing to harvest this information , ( information services) making new products for mobile devices. I think we are going to see a lot of this.