UrbanSeeder Combines Online Anonymity with Offline Interaction

Maya Lotan's grad school project, UrbanSeeder, is a new way to harness technology for dating and hook-ups -- and it's about to launch commercially. We Make Money Not Art has a mini-interview with Maya here, in which she describes the difference between designing the service for school and making it work in the real world:

The first challenge, for me, was finding people to believe in the product with me, and people to consult in. The second is adapting the product to the real world, meaningreevaluating the feature set according to what is really key to theproduct vs. what is just fat, or what relates to existing behavior vs.
relies on hypothetical future technology trends. The third, is thinkingabout the product as a business machine, where the challenge is not somuch in the numbers, but more in the forming of a model.

I guess, the biggest challenge is 'letting go' of my idealistic vision and conforming with reality.

The idea of UrbanSeeder is that you "tag" people in the wild and hope they come to a private online space where you can get to know each other -- without necessarily revealing names, addresses and social security numbers. If you hit it off there, you might then meet in a safe public place ... and who knows what might develop?

It seems like a lot of interesting new combinations of sex and tech are coming out of interactive design programs. The (former) grad students behind the Talk2Me NSFW vibrator not only took their final project commercial, they have already refused offers to sell the entire company to larger corporations.

What else is coming along? If you're a student working on a sex-tech project and you intend to take it commercial, let me know. I smell a future column...