Pretty Cool App from the Census Bureau

Today I wound up spending a half hour at my cable company store in order to replace my old worn out cable box/DVR. I used the time messing around with a new phone app that I recently downloaded from the U.S. Census Bureau call "dweller." It turns out to be the kind of thing you might expect from a geodemographics company like Nielsen Claritas. You enter your geographic and demographic preferences for a place and the app returns the top 25 communities in the U.S. that fill the bill. It also knows where you are (if you allow your phone to reveal that information) and so you can compare the top 25 with where you are at the moment. Ostensibly, the idea is that can help you find where you want to live. At the same time, you actually could use it for targeting your product, in the same way that geodemographics firms do. The latter have more sophisticated statistical routines, but you can't argue with dwellr's cost--free!