In his post, entitled “This Is What Happens When Publishers Invest In Long Stories,” FastCo Labs editor Chris Dannen talked about how the site decided to experiment with what he calls “slow live-blogging” — that is, a series of stories that would take shape over time, beginning with a short stub article consisting mostly of a topic paragraph or summary of an issue, and then get added to as new developments arose. Dannen explained that this was a way of blending news with a more feature-like approach.

“Instead of starting with a fresh article every time we want to cover something inside a regular beat, which might require a long catch-up introduction, context, background and so forth, we could just put fresh news at the top and let the reader scroll down to read previous updates.”

Readers stay longer and read more

What happened when this approach started getting rolled out, Dannen says, was fairly dramatic. As he puts it in his post, the results “blew up my assumptions about how to drive traffic.” Among other things, the tech site’s “bounce rate” — that is, the rate at which readers decided to quit reading and go elsewhere — dropped substantially. The average amount of time spent at the site also increased, as did the number of pages per visit that were read by users.

Dannen says it’s too early to tell how permanent these effects will be for Fast Co. Labs, just as it’s impossible to know whether those favorable results stem from the changes they made in their approach to longer stories. But he says that regardless of these caveats, “it sure as hell looks like it’s working,” and that he believes long-form journalism is the future.

It’s not length, it’s engagement

I am a big believer in the value of longer pieces in general, and I think the once-popular myth that people don’t read longform articles online has been largely disproven (although I wonder how many of those who praised the New York Times feature Snow Fall read the whole thing). But it’s also true that editors and publishers often conflate length and quality — as Caroline O’Donovan pointed out in a (short) post on Fast Co.’s experience at the Nieman Journalism Lab.

I think Fast Company’s results actually show something very different from the appeal of longform articles per se: since these posts began with “stub” articles and then grew over time, as more news or analysis emerged about the topic itself, I think they show the value of engaging readers by following a story over time and providing some kind of comprehensive background and context, instead of just bombarding them with a stream of news briefs.

That approach may result in longer stories, but I think that’s almost a side effect rather than the main attraction. No one is going to read those kinds of posts simply because they are long — but if a site builds a narrative and a point of view and some context over time about an issue (the mobile news-reading app Circa is trying to do this by allowing users to “follow” specific breaking news stories, and then alerting them to updates) then it pays off in engagement.

There are lessons in there not just for new-media players but for traditional media outlets that are trying to find a recipe for success online as well.

Note: This post was updated on May 14 at 12:12 am to correct the spelling of Chris Dannen’s name.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Scholastic

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For those who may not have used it, Waze — which won our Launchpad event at Mobilize in 2009 — provides real-time information about everything from road closures and accidents to traffic backups and police speed-traps. The information is superimposed on a scrollable map, and there are also a number of social features built in, which allow users to see and share information, including messages, with other drivers. Waze even provides gas-price data.

Facebook wants to acquire mobile users

If Facebook does acquire Waze for $1 billion, as reported by Israeli media outlets like Calcalist and Ynet, it would be one of the biggest acquisitions the social network has ever made, rivalling the purchase of mobile photo-sharing service Instagram (which signed a deal for $1 billion but actually wound up being acquired for $750 million due to a drop in Facebook’s share price). And the rationale for the deal would be much the same as it was for Instagram — namely, acquiring and holding onto mobile users.

As my colleague Erica Ogg explained when the Apple rumors were floated earlier this year, Apple would also make a good fit for Waze, in part because the company’s mapping app is seen by many as an also-ran to Google’s more feature-rich service — which is why there was such an outcry last year when Apple suddenly cut off Google and switched iOS users to its own maps.

But while Apple would be a good fit, and Facebook has its own reasons for wanting a service like Waze, I think Google would be the real loser if it went to either of these companies, for the simple reason that Google Maps is a big part of the company’s mobile appeal — at least for me, and I would suspect for many others. My reliance on Google Maps was one of the reasons why Apple’s move irritated me and helped push me towards the Android platform, and Waze is good enough that it could help either Apple or Facebook leap-frog Google.

Google has the most to lose

I’ll admit that I was somewhat skeptical about the value of Waze until I tried using it on a long drive from Florida to Toronto earlier this year. I had looked at the service a few times, but it didn’t have a lot of data or users in Canada (it now has about 45 million users worldwide) and I didn’t see the appeal of the social elements. But when I started using it during this long drive, its utility quickly became obvious — and I stopped using Google Maps altogether.

I’m not yet sold on the ability to connect with other users through the app (unless they are friends already, which would make sense if you were on a trip together), but being able to see at a glance where there is a traffic jam — and even what speed people are going who are stuck in it — and where there’s a speed trap or a police car on the roadside was hugely useful. The gas price data also came in handy more than once.

Google Maps also has traffic data, and it is also based on real-time information, which comes from other users of the service who have their GPS location turned on. It is pretty accurate — but I don’t find it nearly as useful as Waze. I didn’t think enough people would take the time to enter information about things like traffic or speed traps into Waze to make it useful, but I was wrong. And Google doesn’t seem to have any plans to try and duplicate that, since it is more focused on automating that whole process, in typical Google fashion.

There’s no sign that Google has shown an interest in acquiring Waze, but I think the company would be stupid not to at least consider trumping Facebook’s offer. It could wind up losing its way, and a bunch of mobile users to boot.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Dunechaser and Waze

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As newspapers around the world rush to erect paywalls to bolster their declining revenue — with Britain’s Telegraph and Sun papers just the latest to join the parade, along with the Washington Post — there are a few holdouts who insist on generating revenue the old-fashioned way: namely, through advertising. One of the most prominent proponents of this model is the Daily Mail, which has become one of the world’s largest news websites. The Mail’s approach may not be for everyone, but according to the paper it is working extremely well, thank you very much.

The data behind that boast comes from an investor presentation that Media Briefing sat in on recently by the paper’s parent company, DMG Media, in which the company projected that its digital revenue could soon exceed its print revenue — a transition that few newspapers could even think about realistically at this point, let alone forecast for the near future. And the Mail says this isn’t happening as a result of declining revenue overall, as it is with some newspapers.

So what accounts for this kind of success? Critics would argue that it is the Mail‘s somewhat lackadaisical approach to accuracy, since a number of the newspaper’s most popular stories consist of rumors or salacious tidbits that in some cases turn out not to be true. But is this any different from any number of tabloid newspapers before the web came along? It may not be the course that the New York Times or Washington Post want to take, but there is no arguing with the results.

In a nutshell, the Mail‘s approach is to give the web what it wants — interesting stories, many of them about celebrities or odd events, and plenty of variety: the paper says it updates the home page every 30 minutes at least, which it believes is part of the reason it gets over 100 million unique visitors a month. And the engagement levels aren’t just orders of magnitude larger than other newspapers, but impressive even compared to sites such as Yahoo:

Obviously, not everyone can be (or wants to be) the Daily Mail. But whatever its flaws, the paper has done a pretty good job of being web-native, not just recreating a paper experience online. It’s the same approach that digital-only content publishers like BuzzFeed and The Huffington Post have taken, and while it may not produce as much revenue as print advertising does, the Mail has shown that it is possible to grow that business.

And what about a paywall? Editorial director Michael Clarke said during the presentation: “We’re not throwing in the towel because we don’t have to. We don’t feel at the moment that’s the way to go… We have scale, engagement and growth.” (Note: We are going to be discussing different models for monetization at our paidContent Live conference in New York on April 17).

Post and thumbnail image courtesy of Shutterstock / kak2s, slides courtesy of Media Briefing

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In his post at Digiday, entitled “Surviving the Media Aggregation Economy,” Morrissey argues that we are trapped in a digital-media environment based on boosting pageviews to draw more advertising, and that this has “taken publishers hostage.” Publishers like Business Insider, he says, have taken this approach to its logical conclusion and generate a lot of their revenue by repurposing content created by others. In one case, Business Insider posted a screenshot of a Digiday post along with a paragraph lifted from the original, and put a new headline on it. Says Morrissey:

“The result: It generated 224 pageviews for the Digiday story. Along the way, BI banked another 1,500-plus pageviews — and that many ‘welcome ad’ impressions along with multiple banners and a ‘native’ video ad. Meanwhile, Digiday’s original post — thought up and executed by our staff — got 2,500 pageviews. Is this a fair trade?”

It’s more efficient to aggregate than create

Morrissey goes on to note that Blodget likes to brag about how efficient his publishing platform is, and how his site gets an average of 180,000 pageviews per day per employee — orders of magnitude larger than many traditional media players such as the New York Times or Bloomberg. But the Digiday editor says much of this efficiency is driven by Business Insider’s repurposing of content created by others (Note: We’re going to be discussing alternate forms of monetization for content at our paidContent Live conference in New York on April 17). As Morrissey puts it in his post:

“Based on my experience, I can’t help but wonder if BI’s “efficiency” is bought at the expense of others. It’s like European countries bragging about low defense spending while relying on the U.S. to do the heavy lifting through NATO. It’s easy to be efficient when you draft off others.”

The debate expanded to Twitter when Blodget responded to Morrissey’s complaint, and suggested that if the Digiday editor was concerned about the screenshot of the images that appeared in the original, Business Insider would be happy to take them out. But Morrissey said his point was that the whole approach is wrong:

Business Insider argues Digiday should be grateful

Blodget argued that publishers like Digiday should be interested in exposing their content to as many different readers and potential readers as possible, and therefore Morrissey should be glad that Business Insider excerpted the post and included a link — something the Business Insider founder compared to a story that appears at Google News, or to the New York Times running a story based on a Wall Street Journal scoop:

Morrissey said that he was happy to have sites link to his content, provided they drove readers in substantial enough numbers, and that he was a big fan of the aggregation site Mediagazer as well as LinkedIn’s content portal. But in his post he noted that Business Insider had gotten close to 100,000 pageviews from content “aggregated” from Digiday, while the latter got a relatively minuscule 14,000 pageviews from Business Insider’s links.

Aggregation is a reality, whether we like it or not

It’s probably fair to say that versions of this debate have been going on for almost as long as the web has been around: questions about “link juice” and the “link economy,” in which traffic driven by an aggregator is supposed to make up for the alleged insult of excerpting their content, and so on. The Huffington Post used to be the poster child for what some have called “over-aggregation,” but now that mantle seems to have passed to Business Insider. And some believe that regardless of whether or not such behavior is legal or permitted under copyright law, it is unethical:

As I’ve tried to point out before, aggregation or curation is a fact of life in the digital age — just as record companies have had to learn to live with rampant downloading and sharing of music, publishers of all kinds are trying to get used to the idea that their content is no longer under their control. In some cases, aggregation fulfills a useful function, as it did in one notorious case involving a Forbes post by Kashmir Hill that was based on a New York Times feature. In other cases, the usefulness is debatable.

As Morrissey points out in his piece, until the financing model for online media involves something other than pure pageview-driven advertising revenue, aggregation is unlikely to stop. The only protection is to have content whose value can’t be summed up in a screenshot or a paragraph excerpt, and a relationship with your readers that is based on more than just how many pageviews you can generate. (Note: There’s a Storify of Blodget and Morrissey’s full conversation here).

Images courtesy of Shutterstock / Zurijeta

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Today’s mobile networks are rife with various forms of traffic shaping and optimization platforms, from transcoding/transrating technologies that cull out extraneous video bits to policy enforcement engines that prioritize certain types of traffic — or certain subscribers — through the length and breadth of the network.

Those technologies all differ in the techniques used and the specific traffic they target, but they all share the goal of trying to ease the mounting deluge of mobile traffic piling up on carrier airwaves. Where Vasona distinguishes itself from the lot is in the level of precision it can target with its traffic shaping techniques, said Biren Sood, CEO of the Santa Clara, Calif.,-based company.

Most optimization technologies apply the work across entire classes of data in the network core, or they follow specific subscribers as they move to and fro, throttling back their speeds or compressing their videos regardless of the prevailing network conditions.

But Sood said that the network should be treated as a collection of its parts, rather than as a unified whole. Congestion occurs at the individual cell, so carriers should optimize their networks accordingly, applying traffic management techniques only where congestion dictates, Sood said.

“We understand the nature of the cell, and we understand the capacity of the cell,” Sood said. “With that understanding we can get the right bits to the right applications in the most efficient way.”

Vasona’s kit sits in between the radio and core networks where it monitors the congestion level of its associated cells as well as all of the inbound and outbound traffic streams to those cells. If a cell starts getting crowded, Vasona will start tinkering with mix of traffic going to that cell, for instance prioritizing streaming bits over a file download or tossing out extraneous information in a video, Sood said. Once the congestion in a particular clears, Vasona’s tinker stops, Sood said.

While the company has been flying under the radar for the last few years, it has been busy raising funds and talking to potential customers. So far it has raised $9.8 million from Bessemer Venture Partners and New Venture Partners, and according to Sood its technology is already in a handful of global mobile networks, though he wouldn’t reveal specific customers.

Vasona is playing in a very crowded space. As smartphones proliferate, and consumers and app developers start increasing their mobile data usage, carriers are looking for ways to alleviate to alleviate that demand. In many cases they’re targeting their customers’ habits directly, introducing stricter data caps, throttling back speeds or banning specific applications. But behind the scenes tweaking their networks with bandwidth optimization technologies.

All of the major infrastructure vendors have either developed or bought their own traffic shaping platforms — most recently Cisco Systems bought BroadHop and Citrix(ctrx) bought ByteMobile — joining an already large field of traffic management specialists like Aircom International, Allot Communications, Sandvine and Openet (which recently raised $21 million). A growing number of startups like Vantrix and Skyfire are specifically targeting the problem of mobile video.

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There’s no question Business Insider has grown substantially since the last time Blodget opened up about his company’s performance: almost two years ago, he released some public numbers, and at that point the site — which was then about three years old — was pulling in 8 million unique visitors per month and had revenues of $5 million. The site even turned a minuscule profit in 2010, Blodget said, of about $2,000 (that’s not a typo).

In the latest update, the Business Insider founder says the site has boosted its traffic substantially, and now gets an average of 23 million unique visitors per month, or more than a million on the average day — growth that he says puts it ahead of giants such as Businessweek, Mashable and TechCrunch.

While that’s impressive, however, Blodget hasn’t provided us with some of the most important data a media company needs in order to prove its health: namely, revenue and/or profitability metrics. It’s probably safe to assume that revenues are higher than they were almost two years ago, or the site would have shut down by now — and they may even be dramatically higher, since pageviews and unique visitors are still popular measurements used by many advertisers to determine success.

But as Blodget himself notes in his presentation, the profitability of digital advertising has been plummeting over the past few years. The amount of advertising is still growing rapidly, and ad revenues are also increasing, but it’s a little like the Red Queen’s race in Alice in Wonderland: media companies are having to run faster and faster just to stay in the same place — every incremental pageview is worth less and less.

This is the same dilemma that almost every media entity is facing, from traditional players such as the New York Times to newer stars like BuzzFeed and The Huffington Post. Some of the newer entrants like BuzzFeed — and even the more entrepreneurial of the old guard, such as The Atlantic and Forbes — are trying to use more “native” advertising formats such as sponsored posts and marketing-related content to combat this problem.

It’s not clear from Blodget’s presentation whether Business Insider is doing much of this, although he does say that social “is not the be-all and end-all” for digital news sites, and that the importance of social as a referrer of traffic is “grossly overstated.” And it isn’t clear what the site is doing instead of social or native advertising — which makes it almost impossible to say whether the company is financially healthy or not.

Huge pageview or readership numbers are nice to have, but they are not enough for a business in and of themselves (just ask Tumblr, which has 20 billion pageviews a month and yet is still facing questions about its business model) unless of course you are planning to flip your business to someone much larger who already has a business model. Business Insider is going to have to answer those kinds of questions somehow, whether Blodget wants to tell us the answers or not.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr / TechCrunch

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The round was led by Battery Ventures and included Wellington Partners. In June, we reported that SumAll had raised a $1.5 million seed round from both of those investors, as well as Matrix Partners and General Catalyst Partners.

SumAll, which reports that it has 15,000 users around the world, helps businesses analyze and visualize a comprehensive set of their most relevant data. For example, an e-commerce company could use SumAll to analyze their sales data from Shopify, PayPal or Magenta against traffic data or Facebook or Twitter social data. At the moment, the company can integrate with more than a dozen sources. But founder and CEO Dane Atkinson said that, with the new funding, they plan to add new features and data streams to the platform, as well as potentially double its staff of 25 over the next year.

“Our customers dig what we’ve been doing so far and they want to see more of their data in the same place,” he said.

Other companies, including startups Custora and GoodData or Google Analytics and Adobe’s Omniture, may compete with SumAll on parts of its business. But Atkinson emphasized that SumAll focuses on helping smaller businesses aggregate disparate data sets and overlay them to reveal insights and patterns.

Despite its focus on small- to medium-sized businesses, he said the company has also attracted Fortune 500 companies. At the moment, SumAll tracks more than $1.5 billion in ecommerce data, 20 billion visits and 2 billion social actions.

The new funding also includes a $500,000 contribution to the SumAll.org foundation, a charitable trust which has a 10 percent ownership stake in the company and was established by SumAll employees.

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Now, with an update to version 3.5, Waze users on iOS  and Android  can sign-in with Facebook and see when friends are navigating to the same place and get their estimated time of arrival. Users can send a pick-up request to another user, allowing the recipient to easily navigate to that location. The sender can also track their ride on a map and see their ETA, even without having the Waze app.

Users can also proactively share their location with others by sending a link, which allows anyone to track their progress without having to use the Waze app. For the privacy conscious, Waze offers users the option to go invisible.

The update to 3.5 also includes redesigned maps, an improved interface and other features, such as the ability to see toll roads while routing, send private messages and save parking locations.

Waze has been on fire lately, thanks in part to the botched roll out of Maps on iOS 6. It now reaches 29 million users, up from 13 million six months ago and 26 million just a month ago. Di-Ann Eisnor, Waze’s VP of platforms and partnerships, told me that the company probably picked up an extra 1 million users thanks to iOS 6 and Apple CEO Tim Cook’s endorsement of Waze a Maps alternative.

She said the latest improvements to Waze are designed to help users be more efficient with the system and assist them in connecting through Waze. That’s how many people already use Waze — to pick each other up and meet with friends and contacts who are out and about.

“This is the most social we’ve ever been and the most we’ve dared to go,” said Eisnor. “We wanted to make sure it’s about the driving experience, not another way to look at Facebook. People are already driving with Waze, this is just going to make it much more social.”

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But what if your biggest source of traffic and readers is something you aren’t even really paying attention to, and something that is extremely hard to track in the same way as Google or Twitter or Facebook? That’s the reality of web publishing today, according to Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic — who writes about the influence of what he calls “dark social” on engagement and traffic patterns. While everyone is busy watching Twitter and Facebook because they are easy to track, Madrigal argues that most social traffic still comes from old-fashioned or difficult-to-track sources like email and chat messages:

“This vast trove of social traffic is essentially invisible to most analytics programs. I call it DARK SOCIAL. It shows up variously in programs as “direct” or “typed/bookmarked” traffic, which implies to many site owners that you actually have a bookmark or typed in http://www.theatlantic.com into your browser. But that’s not actually what’s happening a lot of the time. Most of the time, someone Gchatted someone a link, or it came in on a big email distribution list, or your dad sent it to you.”

Most of your social traffic is hidden from you

As evidence, Madrigal provides some data from Chartbeat, the Betaworks spin-off that focuses on real-time analytics for publishers, looking at everything from the amount of time readers spend on a page to how far down they got in an article before they decided to click away. Chartbeat, which we have written about a number of times, is one of the few analytics engines that tries to break down that “direct” category into sub-categories like email and what the service calls “direct social” — meaning everything from apps (for chat or other social features) to instant messaging.

For The Atlantic, the impact of this kind of direct social traffic outweighs any other kind of social network or service like Facebook, Twitter or Reddit: according to data from Chartbeat, the magazine’s website gets almost 60 percent of its social traffic from these hard-to-track sources. Facebook is still a large referrer for the site, generating about 21 percent of the social traffic, and Twitter is also fairly large at 11 percent — but the “dark social” category is larger than all of the other social services combined, and has more than twice the impact that Facebook does.

Chartbeat’s numbers also showed that this direct-social traffic was a large contributor for other sites that the service tracks, according to Madrigal — and Chartbeat is used by some of the largest publishers in the media business, including ESPN and the New York Times. On the average, the company’s stats showed that close to 70 percent of the social traffic to these sites came from email, instant messaging, chat apps and other sources (as Madrigal points out, at many websites including The Atlantic, social traffic far outweighs traffic that comes from search, and that gap is still growing).

The one obvious conclusion to take away from all of this is that measuring user engagement and sources of traffic is probably a lot harder than most publishers think — and they likely already thought it was pretty hard. It’s bad enough that comScore and Compete and Nielsen and Google Analytics all provide different numbers, and it’s almost impossible to tell who is right (especially since all of these sources often disagree with a publisher’s internal statistics). Now there is a huge source of traffic that is even harder to measure: email is trackable in the aggregate, but how do you track instant messaging?

The only solution is to create engaging content

This problem is compounded by the shift to mobile content consumption as well, since chat apps and instant messaging and other direct communication methods are even more prevalent in the mobile world than on the desktop. Links are passed from social network to apps to chat to email, and tracking them quite quickly becomes almost impossible. That’s part of the reason why almost all web publishers get surprised by posts or stories that blow up traffic-wise days or weeks after they first appeared, with no obvious sign of how or why they hit that invisible tipping point.

So how are publishers and media companies supposed to deal with this problem? Madrigal’s solution is an appealing one, at least for those who create content — he says the only dependable way of generating real traffic and engagement is to actually write things that people care about or are interested in. In other words, the “content is king” approach. As he describes it:

“The only real way to optimize for social spread is in the nature of the content itself. There’s no way to game email or people’s instant messages. There’s no power users you can contact. There’s no algorithms to understand.”

It’s not that getting people to share content via email or chat app or instant messaging service is that different from trying to get them to share it on Twitter or Facebook — the same general rules apply, in the sense that it has to be engaging and interesting and shareable, and all of those other things we are supposed to be doing with our content. But the difficult part is that it’s hard to track in the same way publishers watch Facebook “likes” or page followers, or Twitter re-tweets and other metrics. And so it’s difficult to tell whether it’s working and why, or what you should do differently.

In a sense, what Madrigal is describing just reinforces the fact that much of what content companies do is more of an art than a science — even though social-media gurus and analytics providers would like to make it sound like something that can be quantified and measured from every aspect. And maybe that’s not such a bad thing, even if it does make our jobs harder.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user George Kelly and Alexis Madrigal

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The former National Geographic and TIME photographer, who is best known for the Day in the Life book series, has spent his career using imagery to document -– and inspire reflection about -– the changing world.

Rick Smolan, President and CEO, Against All Odds Productions

In his latest project, The Human Face of Big Data, he shares more than 100 stories (culled from an initial list of 1,000) that reveal the concrete, mind-blowingly powerful ways big data is changing how we consume energy, receive healthcare, monitor animal migration, track the weather and more.

As my colleague Derrick Harris recently wrote, the project doesn’t just include a book, but iOS and Android apps that collect data from people around the world and then let users compare information on beliefs and aspirations. (When the book comes out on Nov. 20, people will be able to search and filter the data to see global patterns.) This week, the project also hosted events around the world to bring big data innovators and journalists together.

In looking at the landscape, Smolan told me that he thinks big data is where the Internet was in 1993, but it stands to have an even greater impact on society. Part of the project, he said, was meant to help a wider audience of people understand why big data matters.

“I’m worried that the people thinking about this are corporations and the government and not ordinary citizens,” he said. “One of the goals was to get people thinking and talking about this world of big data while it’s still in its early formation stages.”

Take a look at five examples of how big data is improving everyday life:

Risk-screening for heart attack patients

Researchers John Guttag and Collin Stultz (shown here) along with Zeeshan Syed have created a computer model to analyze formerly discarded EKG data of heart attack patients. Photo: Jason Grow 2012/The Human Face of Big Data

Using discarded EKG data from heart attack patients, researchers from MIT, the University of Michigan and Brigham and Women’s Hospital created a computer model that can help predict which heart attack patients are at risk of experiencing a second heart attack within the year. Through machine learning and data mining they found three EKG abnormalities that correlate with a higher risk of a second attack.

The key is that while traditional screening techniques (which miss about 70 percent of repeat heart attack cases) look at just 30 seconds of a patient’s EKG, the researchers’ model enables doctors to examine hours of EKG recordings to spot the high-risk indicators.

‘Magic Carpet’ patient monitoring

Developed by researchers at GE and Intel, the Magic Carpet prototype uses sensors in a home carpet to monitor the activity of seniors. It creates a baseline of normal movement -– from the usual time people get out of bed to the speed and pressure with which they walk -– and when it senses an abnormality, it sends an alert to loved ones. For now, wireless sensor-enabled system is too expensive for most people, but Smolan said that the basic idea is already evident in the Quantified Self-type gadgets that are gaining popularity. While some might think of self-monitoring devices as narcissistic naval-gazing, he said, they make people more aware and willing to change their behavior, which can improve their health in the long term.

Appliance-level home energy monitoring

Photo: Peter Menzel 2012/The Human Face of Big Data

As the presidential candidates debate how to rethink energy, perhaps they should consider this: the DVR consumes 11 percent of the average American household’s total power. That’s what MacArthur Fellow and University of Washington computer science professor Shwetak Patel learned through a device he developed.

Once it’s plugged in anywhere in a home, the sensor, called ElectriSense, can infer the unique digital signatures (the frequency of the electromagnetic interference) for different appliances to help homeowners see which appliances are the biggest energy hogs and learn how to conserve.

The technology isn’t yet available for purchase, but Belkin International has acquired the technology and the researchers expect them to release a commercial product soon.

Understanding traffic patterns with GPS data

Photo: R. Ian Lloyd 2012/The Human Face of Big Data

When it rains in Singapore, taxicabs are nearly impossible to come by. But it isn’t because they’re all full carting people around, it’s because the drivers have pulled over.

Through a study from the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) comparing weather patterns and taxi activity in the city, researcher Oliver Senn realized that, counter-intuitively, cab drivers pull to the side of the road in inclement weather.

When he dug deeper, he realized that the reason stemmed from a decades-old taxi company policy that requires drivers to put up a $1,000 bond when they’re in an accident. When the policy was initially implemented, drivers could be cleared and returned the money the next day. But now that it can take months for drivers to get their money back, they choose to play it safe and stay off the roads when the risk is highest.

The policy is now being questioned in Singapore, and it shows how powerful data can be in helping cities around the world better understand and improve urban movement.

Early weather warnings

Weather alerts on the television and, increasingly, our smartphones are common in the U.S. But Earth Networks, the company behind the WeatherBug App, says that of the 7 billion people on the planet, 6 billion have never received an alert that could help them avoid severe weather.

Through the company’s tens of thousands of sensors around the world, it monitors temperature changes, wind and lightning to give people early alerts about inclement weather. Lightning, in particular, the company said, is a valuable leading indicator of severe weather and, through its growing network of sensors, it’s working to bring alerts to places like Africa, South America and Asia that don’t currently receive the same level of advance notice.

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