Jayashree was back at the Internet Café conducting end user testing.  She was the end user.  She logged into the web server racked up in her kitchen.  A Google Maps mashup of the city filled her browser.  She’d coded the mashup.  Her app paired Google Maps with either GPS coordinates or GPS-like coordinates generated from cell tower triangulation of people’s mobile devices.  In other words, her app was Loopt.  Jayashree didn’t claim to be an original thinker, she was into value-add.  Her market wasn’t consumer, it was the enterprise.  And she took the functionality into the security domain.

Raj worked at a company that made monitoring systems for criminals.  Ankle bracelets.  He administered the database for their customers’ sensitive personal information.  They used some off-the-shelf criminal justice software and it wasn’t very sophisticated.  But by having access and knowing what data fields were important, Raj was able to model a data schema that would map data feeds from the entire criminal justice industry – if one could call it that.  Considering there are roughly 2 million Americans incarcerated, it’s a healthy market.  But that’s just one market for this information.  As Raj liked to say, “data is the ultimate reusable resource.”  Using the same system, interested employers will be able to track their employees everywhere and maintain logs of their whereabouts.  Likewise, employees will be able to demonstrate compliance to industry regulations based on such logs.  Raj and Jayashree called their app, Alibi.

This software could be applied to almost anything involving people and geography.  Back in the Internet Café, Jayashree tracked Raj and Shankar on their GPS-enabled smart phones.  She then correlated their locations to a mashup of the neighborhood crime index and their eBay reputation scores.  The test results were looking good.