Coming back from parental leave, I suddenly found myself deeply involved in a new project called Eco-Friends. The goal is to make a demonstrator application for people to reflect upon their grocery shopping habits, and in particular products related to seasons. In our vision we will present a socially constructed framing of seasons or what we refer to as the “social season”. In short we divide the information stream from the web into groups – experts like celebrity chefs, buzz channels like twitter, recipes databases, etc. We then let the user reflect upon how products are “popular” within those groups.
My job at the moment is to see how we can model the core engine and collect all that data in a simple fashion. For that I’m implementing programs that can effectively parse such resources. We will then look at how to connect the core engine to the visualization on handheld mobile devices. We had an extremely good meeting with Simway this morning. They will implement the demonstrator on iPhone devices in this first round.