The Null Device

Bump before you bonk

In Iceland almost everyone is, to some extent, related to everyone else. Iceland also shares with its neighbours in Scandinavia fairly liberated and casual attitudes to sex. The downside of this is the possibility of inadvertently going home from a Reykjavík bar with a cousin, not to mention the prospect of running into exes and former one-night stands at family gatherings in the future. But fear not, because now there's an app for that:
An online registry, Íslendingabók ('The Book of Icelanders') holds information about the families of about 720,000 individuals who were born in Iceland at some point in time. Today, the population in Iceland is just about 320,000. The database can be found on islendingabok.is and everyone registered in the database has free access to it.
Three engineers made an app for the 'Íslendingabók' database. People can now easily, and on the go, look up how they are related to other Icelanders. And a precious feature, using the bump technology, allows people that meet to just bump their phones together, to instantly see if they are too related to take things any further. The engineers' slogan for this feature was: "Bump the app before you bump in bed".
The app is Android-only, and only works if you're an Icelandic citizen or registered resident with access to the database.

There are 2 comments on "Bump before you bonk ":

Posted by: Greg Thu Apr 18 18:55:35 2013

cue Tasmania jokes

Posted by: acb Fri Apr 19 08:35:42 2013

I've heard Hobart referred to as the “Reykjavík of the South”, though I think that was due to its size, distance from the Equator and music scene.