Today I was walking around in the beautiful city of Tallinn. The sun was shining, people were smiling – simply a great day. But as I was walking without any map I got „lost“ (even if I didn’t want to find anything) in a part of the city that didn’t look as good as the rest of it. I did not really feel insecure… but I thought that I would recommend a single woman to do her midnight walk in that surrounding. And then I thought: „Hey,… wow… how cool“ and the dots in between are the following idea.

Don’t we all wanna know how safe the places are that we want to discover? When we move from London to San Diego or from New York to Barcelona we do want to know how safe it is. When we search for hotels, hostels (or whatnot) or couches… we all want to know that. Of course not everyone would use a tool that informs about it. But wouldn’t it be interesting – just for safety/interest/whatnot – to see how safe  the street is in which you want to move actually is?

Why not putting up a website with an integrated google-map of the world. Let’s call it „in-secure.com“. Whatever place you see – they are colored from „dangerously red“ to „bright green“. Users can rate the „subjective/felt danger“ in an area. So they simply click on a place an fill out a five-question formulae. Doesn’t need more then 30seconds. And once you rated 10 places (after signing up) you can check all places for free – worldwide and forever.
So you can scale from 1-10 (100 secure to 100% insecure) and just to make sure that one person who is afraid of mouses isn’t as influences on the aggregated rating of a street/block/quarter/city, each rater is weighted. It should be easy to rate. And due to the fact that it is hard to remember how dangerous 3 was, after signing up one has to rate 2 places for each number. Whenever another rating is done one directly sees how dangerous each number meant.

How influential a single rater should be can be seen, when one rates places that have been rated already. Let’s say 20 raters would rate Copenhagen with an 8 (very secure) and rater 21 says 3 (quite insecure). Then rater 21 should be less influential. The more people when rater 22, 23 and 24 also say that it’s quite insecure, the influence of first 20 raters would decrease and the city safety ranking would go from 8 to maybe 6. And so on.

On the long term one can see if a region becomes more safe or not, which might have an effect on the decision to buy a house. This „Insercurity Index“ could have an effect on many decisions. And could also be a fun thing to talk about in the media. Just imagine thousands of travelers would rate their region and check if this and that street in Rio de Janeiro is safe for their late-evening walk. (Or: „Is it really smart not to catch a taxi after partying in Cape Town?“) Just think about it. I(!) would defenetly want to find that out when traveling Cambodia, India or Panama City.

Most often Lonely Planet helps – but not for each street. And New York, Mexico City, L.A. and Tokyo are on many levels closer to countries then cities. So a Lonely Planet might not always work.

The key is to launch fast and in many languages at the same time. English, Spanish, French, German, Portugese, Russian, Italian, Chinese, Japanese and Dutch sound good for the beginning (and cover 80% of the world).

I would advertise online and offline: online on Holiday, Accommodation, Hotelwebsites. Offline with flyers in each hostel, in some hotels and so on.

And last but not least I am thinking of different approaches on how to make money with it. Putting targeted ads on that website is NO OPTION. But think about that and let me know ;)! How can you make users make you give their credit card information? Once you have them it should be possible to create valuable information which people (whatever party) would pay for.

But back to the topic. Of course you could optionally integrate hotels, hostels and others in that map. That’s a little too far.