Today was IBM HackDay 6 – an internal HackDay run across IBM‘s many labs – and I managed to spend a bit of today hacking something together.
In a nutshell, it’s kinda like Plazes, brightkite, dodgeball and others… find out where your friends currently are. And see where they are from your mobile.
The twist is that it gives you quite precise locations for friends within a known indoor campus – such as Hursley Park.
Hursley, like many IBM locations, is a campus, with thousands of employees in a 100 acre site.
What if you’re trying to find someone? Say you’re in a meeting, and a colleague hasn’t turned up yet. Where are they? Are they on their way?
Or you’ve arranged to meet a colleague for lunch or a coffee, and you seem to keep missing each other.
The idea of this hack was to build on the Hursley Maps tool to come up with some way for you to be able to quickly check where your friends are while you’re at work.
Okay… so it’s a fairly flimsy scenario. 🙂
But I’ve enjoyed playing with location-based services ideas before, and thought this would be an interesting twist. Plus, it was an excuse to play with Django which I’ve wanted to try since hearing about it at BathCamp.
