Your cellphone and laptop leave an invisible trail. Collecting this data is known as Reality Mining. A formal definition of Reality Mining is "the collection of machine-sensed environmental data pertaining to human social behavior". We had two such collection projects this year at Where 2.0. They each took advantage of the signals that our inadvertent sensors (mobile phones and laptops primarily) broadcast. Several times through out the conference I told the attendees about the projects and showed them the same visualizations shared in this post.
The goal in having them at Where 2.0 was two-fold. First, Where 2.0 is a conference on location, It's the goal of the conference to show the latest technology at the intersection of location and technology. Reality Mining applications definitely fit that description. Though our attendees' devices are undoubtedly tracked without their knowledge all the time we wanted to make the applications. Secondly, as an event organizer knowing even a little more about attendees group actions is very valuable. We received a little bit of useful data, but there definitely would need to be refinements before it could be considered one of our tools for judging how well a talk was received (the number of new http requests might be more accurate than the movement of attendees).
