Developed by Sense Networks, 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.
Currently, local discovery depends on proactive searching for relevant locations. Users are challenged to input specific location data into mobile interfaces with small screens. Citysense eliminates the need to search. 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. The application intelligently leverages the inherent wisdom of crowds without any change in existing user behavior, in order to navigate people to the hottest spots in a city. And it’s not dependent on having a critical mass of users on the system. Citysense is an application that learns. The application learns about where each user likes to spend time – and it processes the movements of other users with similar patterns. In its next release, Citysense will not only answer “where is everyone right now” but “where is everyone like me right now.” Four friends at dinner discussing where to go next will see four different live maps of hotspots and unexpected activity. Even if they’re having dinner in a city they’ve never visited before.
Sense Networks has built a unique back-end infrastructure that processes years of data encompassing billions of points of positioning data. Created on the Macrosense platform, Citysense leverages this historical data analysis to normalize live location data originating from tens of thousands of devices and users moving throughout a given city.
