CitySense Pegs Nightlife Hotspots with GPS

By plotting anonymous location data from all its users' mobile phones, CitySense produces a infrared-like map of San Francisco showing where the action is.

When you’re trying to get to work in the morning, knowing where other GPS users are all jammed up can help you avoid traffic and keep going. Fourteen hours later, when night falls, knowing where mobile phone users are all jammed up might just point you the hottest place in the city. So goes the logic behind CitySense, a new service that uses aggregate GPS data to tell what spots are hopping in San Francisco.

The application, now out in an alpha release for BlackBerry phones, anonymously submits GPS location data to Sense Networks, which in turn plots them and produces a map of “human traffic.” After installation, users in San Francisco can view a map of their city in real time with red clouds indicating other people, almost like an infrared heat map showing where others are clustered. Since knowing geographically where people gather doesn’t do most people any good, the application also accesses Google and Yelp to sift through business in that area that might be drawing a crowd, like bars, clubs and restaurants. It can even tell you, in total, whether the city is busier or quieter than usual on a given night.

The technology to make this happen, known as the Macrosense platform, has already been in use for measuring retail traffic (a more obvious commercial application), but CitySense was designed to see what else the data could accomplish. Sense Networks hopes to use feedback from its first users to help refine and tweak the system, but assures that the data it collects is strictly anonymous.

At the moment, only users of the BlackBerry Pearl, Gamma Ray and Curve phones are able to install CitySense, but the company will be releasing an iPhone version soon.