Perth Voice Interactive

Fed up with spending all night waiting to get into a club, three lads have made their own app to gauge wait times.

Nick Ainsworth, Anthony Maher and Dan Preston developed the free NightGuy app so punters could submit the length of lines at clubs. It uses crowdsourcing to build an accurate picture.

Other users can then rate those submissions for accuracy, and the most recent ones get the best weighting. Mr Aisnworth, who’s in his final year of law and economics at UWA, says waiting in line “was quite a frustrating problem in the city”.

“Anthony and I both lived in Europe…when we came back we were surprised by the things patrons had to go through to have a night out in Perth.”

He found wait times of up to an hour at some clubs, and on the worst nights wouldn’t get in at all. There’s also info about cover charges and dress codes, so you don’t walk all the way to Malt supper club and then be told to put on a house shirt before they let you in (yes, this actually happened). If you switch on the GPS it’ll also list the clubs closest to you.

Mr Ainsworth says they knew they needed about 200 users before the app reached critical mass, but just a couple of weekends after launch they’ve already reached about 500.

“It was definitely more than we expected.”

It’s been about nine months since they had the idea, which was programmed by some friends back in Europe. The Android version proved a bit easier than the iPhone programming, and then there’s the usual difficulties getting something listed on Apple’s app store.

“Google’s super easy to deal with.

“Apple being Apple, it’s a little bit difficult dealing with them,” Mr Ainsworth chuckles, “They can definitely take their time and it’s a bit unsettling sometimes when you’re trying to get an update approved and it can be anywhere from two to six days.”

The app’s free “and it always will be,” Mr Ainsworth says, but if it takes off the men will consider inserting advertising banners.

As for the trio of inventors, he says “we’ll see if we can find another problem to solve”.

by DAVID BELL