Imagine a Mafia wars style game were location values changed depending on their foursquare checkins in real time?
What if you could play a social racing game where pedestrian and street traffic was live?
Say Hi to Mapply, and imagine no more.
Elevator Pitch
"Mapply is a next generation platform for real world gaming and location based apps'
Essentially, it's a real time mapping platform which in itself should make any social gaming advocate drool. Mapply has licensed or acquired a ton of data sources, which then mathematically builds a procedural world to interact with, streamed down from the cloud into any device from a pc to a mobile handset. These data sources don’t just include common geo location properties like weather factors and traffic conditions, but also popular business and locations featuring on social networks like Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare.
It's about building a representation of the world that's organic and mirrors real world and social network changes.
Bridge the Divide
Mapply has built upon the idea of 'unique data sources' and the aim is to create a monster mapping application with an enormous amount of developmental potential. One of the biggest problems currently facing geo location games is their static nature: You might play Mafia Wars on a map modeled on native street locations and businesses, but there is no real time interaction between the environment and its players. Mapply promises to change that, with the potential for shifting environmental factors within games modeled on real time data sources, as well as pulling social networking factors to alter virtual location values.
Roll out!
The team has currently got a racing game and a flying game in development, and is planning to
launch an open beta of their product for the Summer Olympics. The hope is to grow the overall footprint of the open beta to span their entire data coverage set, which is a mean 400 cities in over 52 countries worldwide, accessible to consumers through any browser.
The reason I am so damn excited about Mapply is its potential to change the way we interact with mapping data, particularly in its search for nontraditional data sources. I love the idea of developers tinkering with games to exploit trending twitter topics or foursquare activity hubs. It has the potential to change the conventional use of mapping technology for real estate or health services in ways that actually help consumers make informed decisions.
Go run amock in the stripped down version
here.Douglas Stewart is a staff writer at iQU. When he is not writing, he devours books, plays an excessive amount of games, and is working on his upcoming fiction novel that (naturally) involves intersections between technology, gaming and society. Follow Douglas
@TheGearCog 
