A few years ago I had the idea for SMS dating in a bar. The technology would enable people to have an online profile and then when they were within proximity to another person that matched their profile, the system would notify them. It would be great for coffee shops, bars, etc. It’s sense been built to some degree by some folks in Europe and Japan, but has not had much widespread use. Why match.com or a similar property hasn’t done this is curious.
Today I was scanning Citysearch.com for a suitable place to host my friends to meet up for my upcoming birthday. Citysearch is one of my more favorite city guides as it still adds some editorial content, but I still feel that the city guide space online has been dead for a while. There are a lot of great sites where businesses can either post their information for a fee or for free and there are of course the newspaper versions, but nothing that really provides the definitive source for where to go, where to play. Following this need to know what’s hot, other sites have popped up that are more focused on getting the masses to provide feedback, such as Yelp.com. These are great, but overall are noisy with their design and difficult to get through the rants and determine the legitimate insight.
Then it dawned on me, why couldn’t you combine mobile phones location based services and one of these sites. A wireless carrier for example could provide the data that says where users are located. You could then feed this data through a system like Google Maps and show where there are large clusters. Now, filter it through only a listing of known entertainment venues and you’d see what places are happening on any given night. Over time, you could track this by date and average it to see what places are really hot. You could even monitor trends and be able to illustrate what places are up and coming vs. dying out.