What Your Cell Phone Is Teaching Companies

Next time you glance at your BlackBerry, it may be useful to know you're not only checking e-mail, you're making a contribution to the central nervous system of the world.

A mobile phone is, after all, a kind of sensor: every time you send a text message, make a phone call, or download an e-mail, cellular towers pinpoint your position. With 4 billion handsets in use worldwide, that makes for trillions of data points flowing through the network every month and creating digital graphs of our paths through time and space. When aggregated, those individual paths convey a picture of a block, a community, a city even a whole society.

As Sandy Pentland, a professor at MIT's Media Lab, puts it, our cell phones have become the neurons in "an emerging and truly global nervous system."

Until recently, the information cascading out of our mobiles has been more or less ignored. In the past two years, however, there's been a paradigm shift as mobile companies seek new sources of revenue and smarter, more powerful phones embolden a new generation of software designers.

Taken together, these pressures have cracked the data vault. Established companies such as Nokia, Microsoft Relevant Products/Services and Google, as well as ambitious startups and academic researchers, are beginning to interpret the data sloughing off our digital selves. They're doing for real-world sites what the first Internet search companies did for Web sites in the late 1990s: index them, chart their relationships, and in the process learn about the people who move between them.

"Mobile is really the next frontier" for technology-oriented businesses," says Charles Golvin, an analyst with Forrester Research. "If you look at the next 1 to 3 billion online users, these people are going to be online on phones," making location an essential new data point for aspiring Googles to consider.

Search is only the beginning.

Location data will give marketers and advertisers new insight into consumers. Financiers are using it to predict retail trends and inform their stock trades. And researchers say that understanding the movements of people within a city block or neighborhood will enable policymakers to craft more effective government programs, and provide early indicators of a disease outbreak or other public hazard.

Too abstract? Heres a real-world example: Say a jazz group plays a 10 p.m. set at a downtown bar.

Using the location data they've collected, researchers can see where all the jazz aficionados ate dinner before the show, and what kind of late-night clubs they visit after the trumpets hit the final high C. They're putting the jazz club and, by extension, its patrons in the context of the rest of the city. That capability is on display in the company's first application for consumers, CitySense, which shows where everyone is in real time. Cell-phone users who download it can see which blocks are busier than usual, and even learn the most popular destinations people go to from their current location.

That might not sound like much, but if you're a business owner, its sweet music. Businesses spend enormous amounts of time and money trying to understand their customers. Surveys and focus groups, though, are blunt instruments. Sense Networks can craft customer profiles based on where people actually go and what they actually do not where they say they go and what they say they do.

© 2009 Daily Herald; Arlington Heights, Ill. under contract with YellowBrix. All rights reserved.


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