Ryan Janssen, President, Cimarrones

Ryan Janssen invented the virtual equivalent of graffiti: a mobile app that lets users leave their impressions on places that leave an impression on them. The result is a new kind of urban mythology — a documentation of the tall tales and true stories that breathe life into places.

With Janssen's creation, called TagandScan, subscribers digitally map and annotate their lives using mobile devices and location-based wireless technologies that create and read “tags” attached to specific sites. Each tag has a title, locale description and, if the device includes a camera, photo.

“We talk about two primary functions: community development and spatial memory enhancement,” said Janssen, who is president of Cimarrones, the apps developer that markets TagandScan. “If I'm at a place and enjoying myself — or at a place and not enjoying myself — I would just tag it, and I would have it forever.”

Janssen founded Cimarrones with his wife, Jessica Lowe, in 2002. The company's first wireless product, Cybaura, allowed users to digitize their personalities, creating profiles by completing a series of surveys over mobile devices. Cybaura-enabled devices would then scan for each other using Bluetooth. Janssen cites the spotty adoption of Bluetooth as Cybaura's fatal flaw. Also, “we cut out the mobile operators — and they don't think that's too cool,” he said. “They're the ones who have the distribution channel to the customers.”

TagandScan doesn't make the same mistakes because it offers carriers ways to collect revenue that can offset the massive infrastructure investment required to develop location-based technologies: Tags, position-based scans and map retrievals are all premium services. Currently offered only in London, TagandScan should be available in more European, U.S. and Asian cities by year's end.

“People have so much oral history about where they are,” Janssen said. “If you can instantiate that and put it into a real physical presence located on that place, over time you can build up a rich and interesting history that's accessible to everyone.”