Imagine that your business had a complete log of your customers' wanderings — every trip to the grocery store, every work commute, every walk with the dog. What could you learn about them? Armed with that knowledge, what sorts of goods and services might you try to sell them? Just as important, if you made your best pitch — relevant and timely, of course —would customers concerned about privacy tell you to get lost? This isn't science fiction. A nascent industry extending from the laboratories of Google and Nokia to a host of data-fueled startups is wrestling with these very questions. On a snowy winter evening in New York's SoHo neighborhood, a small team of analysts at a startup called Sense Networks is poring over the movements of nearly 4 million cell-phone users over the course of a year. They have been tracked by global positioning systems, by cell towers that catch their signals, or by local Wi-Fi networks that detect their presence. As far as the Sense analysts can see, these people have no names: They are simply dots moving across the maps on Sense's computers. (The data trove comes from a company New York-based Sense will not name.) Much can be learned, it turns out, from the patterns of those dots moving across the maps. It's possible to see clusters grow around a popular restaurant or retail store. It's also easy to learn about each dot. Business travelers tend to congregate in certain spots in each city. The newly unemployed often shift from the clocklike routine of work to far more random movements. And Sense can flesh out these digital stick figures with additional data. By noting where dots appear to sleep, the company can assign an average neighborhood income to each one. It then becomes easier to predict whether those spending time near car lots are in the market for luxury brands or economy models.
IT3 komment:A helyalapú szolgáltatások és az eufemisztikusan feltérképezésnek is nevezhető monitorozás (geo-tracking) logikus összekapcsolása, valamint a mobil internet térhódítása egyrészt igen komoly új üzleti lehetőségekkel, közösségek formálódásával kecsegtet, másrészt sokakban keltheti a még nagyobb megfigyeltség érzetét.
Forrás: businessweek.com
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