Tripadvisor has launched a new platform to help consumers identify
areas that are less crowded in cities around the United States.
Known as Crowdfree.me, the platform was created by a
team of engineers from Tripadvisor, Slack, Amazon Web Services and nine other
technology companies.
Tripadvisor spokersperson Brian Hoyt says the initial idea
came from someone who is no longer with Tripadvisor, but another engineer still
with the company took the lead on developing the platform in partnership with
these other companies, whose engineers volunteered time to develop the system.
Crowdfree.me is intended to help consumers avoid crowds at both
businesses and public places such as parks and beaches. The system uses
aggregated, historical traffic data from anonymized cell phone location pings
from users that have opted in to share their location via their mobile devices.
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The data is displayed on a map and graphed based on the time
of day and the day of the week. Data is updated once each day and more recent
data is weighted higher than older data.
Users can click on a
location to view how crowded it is for each hour on a particular day or a given
day of the week. An overlay of a heatmap also indicates the density of crowds
in public areas, using yellow for low density and red for high.
The platform also incorporates
location safety scores from ViruSafe by Neura, one of the technology partners,
so users can identify public spaces and businesses where COVID risk rates are
high.
The system does not
store personally identifiable information, and Hoyt says none of the data is
used for commercial purposes.