Business Development Diary

Somebody should have told the UMichigan students that Mates was a brand of condom launched by Virgin's Richard Branson in the 80s. Maybe the naming is intentional, as Mates is "A location-based social networking system." Bottom line, this is an IM system with location awareness built in. The location input could be manual (you set your location), Wi-Fi positioning like Ekahau, or wireless (say cell ID or GPS). The interesting part is that the system has associative memory, so it tries to associate IP addresses with locations.