Sense Networks
= works with Geolocation data, to establish 'tribes', in order to answer the question: "where's my tribe"
URL = http://www.sensenetworks.com/
Description
Tony Jebara:
"Sense Networks started three years ago. The basic idea was that we want to use location information, which we're all collecting right now; everyone in this room, through their cell phones, is providing information about where they are. Obviously, you're all here at eComm 2009, so that reveals something very important about you.
We asked ourselves what is next and how do we move beyond just a network of online places, to a network of real places, instead of a network of our online personas, to a network of our real personas? It's very easy to get online data. We're always online generating that kind of data, but how do we get data about what we're doing in the real world?
It turns out, through the large availability of GPS that we can now start getting a lot of information about what we're doing in the real world. Whenever you use your phone, or any one of these navigation devices or any smart mobile device, or even if you take a taxi, you generate mobile location data.
Sense Networks is in the business of collecting a lot of this data from various partnerships and also through our own direct applications, and then mining this data to do a lot of the things we are doing in the online world, but with off line data. We are doing collaborative filtering, marketing, smart advertising, smart search; all the things we're used to in the online world can now be done with the off line data.
What Sense Networks does is it tries to understand places and people from location data, to enable all these different services. Here is an example of what our data looks like. This is 4 million users, is roughly the dataset sizes we're working with now, and their locations up to the past three years. We are trying to with this data is understand what is going on, what these people are about; if they're consumers, segmenting the consumers for marketing and advertising and promotion purposes and also understanding what places are all about.
Here is an example of a few hundred users in Manhattan, running around commuting. What are these people doing? How can I better understand one of these consumers if they're one of my consumers? How do I know what to sell them or how to advertise to them?
From this massive amount of data, there is actually a lot of very rich information. That's what we're hopefully going to be able to show you, today. For example, we can just look at the information in aggregate and begin correlating the activity of people from their movements with the stock market. It turns out, people start coming into work very early in the financial district, when the DOW Jones starts to drop, which makes sense. When we see a big drop in the DOW Jones, everybody starts coming in early and stops slacking off on in their commutes.
Other interesting things was people going out late at night when the market was doing well, but now if you look at the nightlife of San Francisco, it's actually gotten quieter, just because the market has been slow. These are things in aggregate. We even see some interesting things like, right before bonus time; everybody goes into work extra early. There is a lot of rich information in the aggregate.
We also provide an application that lets you see the density of people, in real time, on a street map. This is San Francisco. You can download this to your iPhone or BlackBerry. It shows you how many people are at every street corner, more or less, in real time. If I go out at night, and I want to find a good restaurant or bar that has a big crowd, I can look on the heat map and do a search for where is the crowd right now, in real time. That tells you where everyone is.
The next version of it is not just where is everybody, but where is everyone like me. That's the first thing people ask us. I don't want to just see a heat map of the activity in the city, where everybody is. I want to see where my crowd is." (http://ecommmedia.com/blog/2009/03/tony-jebaras-keynote-transcript.html)
More Information
- Business Week: Mapping a New, Mobile Internet