Minority games, not Minority Report the movie. :P In game theory, minority games [0] are a class of games that includes the El Farol Bar problem, a class in which the payoffs depend on the number of actors who make each choice. For the most part, the strategic aspect of these games disappears when you have enough information about who has choosen what so far.

On the parking point—there do seem finally to be some real efforts underway to gather data about parking availability. At an average cost of about $40,000 per spot in a parking structure and low overall utilization, it's astounding that it's taken this long for serious attempts to emerge to find ways to allocate parking more efficiently. In addition to solutions that involve putting sensors in situ, car-makers are starting to think about how they can use the ever-expanding array of sensors in their vehicles to map parking spaces and track their availability [1].

But there are surely other open problems of the same sort that Density's data could help solve: how many people are jamming into the subway right now, or how many are at the farmer's market already? In this common sort of situation, your experience depends on how many other people are doing what you're contemplating doing, and your behavior will (or would) change with better information about who's doing what.

Look for those sorts of problems to apply your data to, I'm suggesting. There might also be opportunities to map demand irrespective of supply. In the parking situation, for instance, tracking the number of open spaces only gets you so far; you also want to know how much aggregate demand there is, because that helps you figure out whether to build more capacity. Second-order statistics like how many people are checking a location's activity in the app can help you estimate that sort of thing.

0. See, e.g., http://www-f1.ijs.si/~rudi/sola/MinorityGame-Seminar.pdf [PDF]

1. http://arstechnica.com/cars/2015/02/remote-valet-mode-and-re...