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Louis on breaks from the University of MissouriColumbia, he and his buddies discovered the barhopper's Goldilocks paradox: The places they stopped in were often too empty or too crowded, but none seemed just right.



"I kept thinking, 'Wouldn't it be nice to know what the scene was like before paying $20 for a cab?' " Harper, 27, said.



"Are there people there? Girls? Is it a young crowd or more mature?"



To help answer those questions, Harper and friend Marc Doering founded SceneTap. The free mobile application uses cameras loaded with facialdetection technology to feed users' phones realtime data about the number of people black friday uggs in a bar, their average age and the maletofemale ratio.



SceneTap launched last month in Chicago, and so far about 75 venues there have paid to be included in the app. Harper, the company's CEO, said he was planning to bring the technology to his hometown this fall. He has been fielding requests from bar owners from California to Israel.



"We've gotten interest from people in every continent except Antarctica," Harper said of his 50person company. "We're just closing out a second round of financing, and our focus right now is on national expansion. Our goal is to be in 1,000 venues a year cheap uggs from now."



Here's how SceneTap works: A small camera positioned at a bar's entrance keeps track of the number of people coming and going, and a second camera scans faces to determine gender and approximate age. (An algorithm matches the bar patrons' facial characteristics to an anonymous database to come up with ages and genders.)



The data updated every five minutes are posted on SceneTap's website and its smartphone app. For example, a user could see that Bar X is 80 percent full, the ratio of guys to girls is about even, and the average age of men in the bar is 23 while the women average 31 years old.



The locationbased app also runs Grouponlike specials and allows users to share what they're doing through social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.



"We created a onestop shop that works a little like Foursquare, a little like Groupon, a little like Facebook," Harper said. "We feel like we've taken the best aspects of those sites and added this unique data that helps you figure out where you want to go."



The data, and particularly the way SceneTap collects it, stir some potential privacy concerns. Cameras in public venues can be unsettling for patrons and management even more so when the cameras are scanning faces for information.



Harper stressed that the cameras do not record or stream any images or personal information; they only collect and transmit data. So while the cameras can determine that a barfly appears to be a 30yearold man, they are not capable of identifying that person as, say, John Doe, 30, of Kirkwood, Mo.



"We're not recording or streaming any footage or posting anything on YouTube. That would be creepy, and we have no interest in that," Harper said. "If a bar fight breaks out and police come, I don't want my company to be responsible for turning over that video."



While the camera aspect made SceneTap somewhat of a difficult sell at first ("I was going around town saying, 'Hey, you don't know me, but I want to put cameras in your bar. Is that cool?' " Harper said with a laugh), venue owners have quickly warmed up. SceneTap provides them with analytical data and demographic information about their clientele that goes far beyond what was previously available.



Chad McConneghy, general manager of Wellington's Tavern in Chicago's Lakeview neighborhood, said he had found that SceneTap could be especially helpful on slow nights.



He said he had heard from several customers that they enjoyed using the app to see if Wellington's was running any deals or hosting a trivia night or what the crowd was like on a Saturday night. None of them has complained about having cameras trained on his or her face.



"That was my first thought: 'Is this storing information? Are people going to get freaked out by this?' " McConneghy said. "But it hasn't been an issue at all. The cameras don't record anyone's images, and they're not intrusive at all. You can barely even see them."