Okay, so. I’m doing this thing called Startup Weekend. A bunch of people who want to start businesses get together and pitch ideas, then people clump together and work on those ideas for a weekend. Maybe they start a business about it.

(If you know me, you know that I don’t at all want to start a business right now! But I do like hacking on things and learning things etc, and I’m interested to learn how these startuppy things go and how people make software things quickly.)

So while other people are working on all these actual serious things where they’re going to make money or save the world or social network facebook linkedin twitter mashup foursquare blaaaaaah, a guy named Gary and I are making an app called “Am I in a bar or not?”

The premise is simple: you know how often you hold up your phone to Shazam a song, and it’s all noise and Shazam doesn’t work? Well, there’s a lot of background noise there, which is a lot of data… what can we learn from that data? How about whether you’re in a bar or not? So our app will work like Shazam: you hold up your phone, get an audio sample, and it tells you whether you’re in a bar or not.

Here’s where you can help: we need data points. We need data from you when you’re in a bar, we need data from you when you’re not in a bar. So please, record 10 seconds or so of audio with your iphone or whatever you have (an app called “hifi recorder” works well on android, unless you know a better one), send it to amiinabar@gmail.com, with the subject line “in a bar” or “not in a bar”, accordingly.

Kthxbai.