Comments on: Using the iPhone to Mine for Gold & Sense

By: Sense Gets New Funding, Focuses on New Markets

Sense Gets New Funding, Focuses on New Markets — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 16:10:30 +0000

[...] with real-world information to come up with analytics that can help users make better decisions. It was shortly after meeting with Sense Networks’ Chief Scientist Tony Jebara last year that I started to admire the idea behind the company and at the same time to consider the true [...]

By: Panjiva: Panning for Gold in Numbers - GigaOM

Panjiva: Panning for Gold in Numbers - GigaOM — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 14:22:02 +0000

[...] Using the iPhone to Mine for Gold & Sense [...]

By: The Commoditization of GPS & the Golden Age of Location-based Services - GigaOM

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 03:30:20 +0000

[...] LBS applications. The subsequent success of independent applications makers — Pelagao and Sense Networks, for instance — will in turn push other platform owners to find interesting LBS applications, [...]

By: The Commoditization of GPS & the Golden Age of Location-based Services - GigaOM

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 03:30:20 +0000

By: George

George — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 16:29:02 +0000

I think that LBS will be a great app for the foreseeable future. But there are a lot more useful applications, you can read about some like radiation and pollution meters, traffic, etc. Using "participatory urbanism" to deal with a problem is a great tool. And might come handy at times.

By: Workshop session on geodata visualization at Alper.nl

Workshop session on geodata visualization at Alper.nl — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 22:03:29 +0000

[...] Using the iPhone to Mine for Gold & Sense [...]

By: Elibom

Elibom — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 21:13:01 +0000

Recently I browsed around about the location-based services (LBS). Most people believe it would be the next big thing or killer app. Quite a few others have different opinion. e.g.,

http://www.smallsurfaces.com/2008/06/do-we-need-lbs/
http://www.lewebmobile.com/2008/06/do-humans-really-need-location-based.html

Here I can possibly present one opinion from the consumer/end-user perspective, which I have posted in some other places too.

Do we need LBS so badly?

Before I really go to the details. Let me give a review of one simple concept and theory here, which are called “Home Range Concept” and “Traffic Pattern Theory”.

Home Range Concept. It is a concept that can be traced back to a publication in 1943 by W. H. Burt, who constructed maps delineating the spatial extent or outside boundary of an animal’s movement during the course of its everyday activities.

Traffic Pattern Theory. A people’s daily activity pattern is pretty regular, which comprises of several major events, such as school, work, home, shopping.

As I remember, a technical explanation of traffic pattern theory can be found in a report by Stefan Schonfelder, STRC 2001.

http://www.strc.ch/schoenfe.pdf

What happened here is if you are looking at the traffic pattern of a person, saying a full-time employed, 45 years, car, 3-person-household, one child, the regular activity route is so LIMITED. So, does this mean …

A more detailed explanation of LBS for mobiles can be found by
http://to.swang.googlepages.com/
http://to.swang.googlepages.com/lbs

By: George

George — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 19:19:07 +0000

How is the issue of privacy being addressed? is this service running in the background of the phones that enable it?

It can be extrapolated out of actual cell phones to track other things. Like RFID on steroids, using the cellular networks as a way to report back to a server

By: AT&T Mobility Chief: New 3G iPhone Game Changer - GigaOM

AT&T Mobility Chief: New 3G iPhone Game Changer - GigaOM — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 12:44:05 +0000

[...] a red-letter day for location-based services? RDLV: Absolutely! I think you will see a whole lot of applications using LBS and there are entrepreneurs who are going to be building them. This is such a huge opportunity. I [...]

By: AT&T Mobility Chief: New 3G iPhone Game Changer - GigaOM

AT&T Mobility Chief: New 3G iPhone Game Changer - GigaOM — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 12:44:05 +0000

By: How Can You Not Be Touched - GigaOM

How Can You Not Be Touched - GigaOM — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 03:35:04 +0000

[...] to be in New York for the Internet Week, while I waited for Tony Jebara, CTO of Sense Networks, a company I wrote about earlier this [...]

By: Andrew

Andrew — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 15:50:02 +0000

The idea is basically sound in the abstract and quite a few hedge funds do have an interest in this kind of thing, but it usually does not scale in practice. Conventional spatial data platforms are deeply inadequate for managing the volume of data involved, which can easily run into the petabytes per day. Consequently, most of these companies will fail to really scale up in an interesting way, as the limits are surprisingly low (mere terabytes for most platforms). Making this concept work essentially requires solving an old algorithm problem in theoretical computer science, which would allow someone to build a Google-like cluster generalized to spatial data (which is a superset of text data — it would be a potent research breakthrough). Anyone who has had to wrangle modest amounts of spatial data for analytics know just how difficult this scale-up issue is, and there is a bit of naivete among some location-based startups with respect to this issue.

As far as I know, the only startup venture involved in the spatial aggregation area that is interesting is SpaceCurve, and then only because their spatial platform is supposed to be based on a very general solution to the theoretical computer science problem mentioned above, giving them some unusual leverage. There is a lot of high-value mining to be done on this data but you have to be able to absorb it first, which if it was easy Google would have already done it years ago. That Google apparently can’t do it, despite the desire to do so, should raise some red flags with respect to many spatial data startups that are entering the market without a clear idea of how they are going to address this issue over the long term — it is not a case of being solvable by throwing money at the problem.

By: Martin Edic

Martin Edic — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 15:18:26 +0000

A different approach to this is to use a social media monitoring and analysis tool like ours (sorry but it’s very relevant to this post) to track conversations about a potential investment across social media: blogs, Twitter, forums, UGC, social networks, etc. You enter keywords in categories including competitors, sectors, brands etc. The results are real time so trends and memes including sentiment, demographics and geo-location can be spotted far before they hit ‘traditional’ web media. These tools are subject-agnostic rather than being focused on investments, real estate or other vertical social media tools- and the data is anyone’s to track, keep and analyze.

By: Marc

Marc — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 15:11:04 +0000

Trading is the tip of the iceberg: the real power comes in being able to use this data to make mobile and localized advertising across old and new media almost as measurable (and real-time responsive) as AdSense. This leads potentially to conducting localized, statistically valid advertising experiments with old media like billboards, print, radio, and local cable.

By: Graeme Thickins

Graeme Thickins — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 14:49:40 +0000

I love it that startups are being funded by hedge funds…