Reality mining
Posted on June 24, 2008 by Karl Palmås
Just a little tip - check out yesterday’s New York Times piece on reality mining, and the recent Nature article on “human mobility patterns”.
Roughly eight years ago, in 2000, I went to a job interview somewhere in Clerkenwell. The prospective employer was yet another new media start-up, doing positioning services related to mobile devices. The founder knew that since mobile devices’ positions are being logged, he could help service providers with things like a) selling services to users (”your friend X is nearby”) and b) offer location-specific advertising. Obviously, I was way too incompentent to get the job. (Though it must be said, most of us were blagging our way through the new media hype around that time.)
Today, it is interesting to note that the discussions on location services back then did not anticipate the “panspectric gaze” that was about to emerge. With reference to the Nature article, tracking the aggregate mobility patterns of 100.000 mobile users over a 6-month period, NYT notes
It’s hard to make sense of such data, but Sense Networks, a software analytics company in New York, earlier this month released Macrosense, a tool that aims to do just that. [...] statistical models interpret those patterns and look at whether they correlate with things in the real world.
Such “reality mining” software is, the article tells us, also provided by companies Inrix and Path Intelligence. The market for this software is likely to grow, but already substantial. As the Gartner Group analyst describes it,
“many companies are just sitting on data”,
not exploiting it properly. After all, it is only once the data has been converted into panspectric vision that companies can predict - as the article’s title suggests - “where you’ll go and what you’ll like”.
Filed Under panspectric organisation |
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Wrote a bit about this (in Swedish), in reference to an interesting article in Economist Technology Quarterly which you would maybe like to check out.
Ah, of course - missed both your post and the ETQ - thanks!
Interesting that mobile phone operators seem to be quite willing to give up their positioning data to third parties. Also interesting that it is phycisists who use this data - as the editorial in Nature suggests, “traditional” social science stat techniques are apparently not as effective for these data large sets.
Indeed. This is why panspectric data represents nothing, but is performing reality itself.
Funny, I was just writing that same sentence in my paper just now…
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