Tracking smart phones: digging deep into mobile phone location data

Deep excavation of mobile location data to enhance the effectiveness of targeted advertising and the ranking of local business services.　　Earlier this month, Skyhook Wireless unveiled a new service that could be used to provide more accurate information about the business, such as which bar is booming at 8 o'clock in the Monday, or how many pedestrians will pass a poster before noon in Friday. In the past 24 months, Skyhook Wireless's anonymous location database, collected from mobile terminals using its services, shows that users in major cities in North America have a daily or even hourly behavior data of up to 100 meters in a week.　　The data comes from 300 million registrations a day, including the iphone, IPad, the Snow Leopard operating system laptop, and Dell devices and the growing number of Android smartphone users. Hot query: Spotrank company created a "hot map" showing the density of mobile phone users at a given location and time. This image shows March 29 Monday 6 o'clock in the afternoon the southwest corner of the middle-spirited park in Manhattan. Source: Skyhook Wireless Several other vendors are using similar techniques to build time-and-azimuth maps of people's daily activities, which were initially called "reality digging".　　However, no other company has been able to provide independent developers with massive amounts of data that can compete with Skyhook wireless. The new service, introduced by Skyhook Wireless, is called "Spotrank", which is provided to developers through its partner SimpleGeo's application Programming Interface (API), and SimpleGeo's services are based on cloud computing, For managing massive geographic data. This data is similar to a user density hotspot map for any city at any point in time.　　At the same time, the data can be strung together in chronological order to reveal changes in people's activities in the city from work hours to home work and nightlife. Skyhook Wireless has also begun to develop applications based on SPOTRANK data-including new ways to attract users through outdoor advertising.　　"We can tell The Advertiser where the position on the side of the Manhattan is the best place to put the billboard," said Ted Morgan, Skyhook's chief executive. "The data are very valuable," David Fono David Fono, a developer at the "atmospheric industry" Company, who recently started using the Spotrank API to develop several outdoor games in the city through classes. "The data they have is unbelievable," Fono said. "This is a vital part of the tool." Because this data is a true description of the flow of people in a region, I don't know at this momentThere are other things that can be compared with Tao. Today, the development of the user's physical mobile location data has attracted more and more high-tech companies attention, but the attendant privacy issues, become a hot issue that can not be ignored. "We would also like to do some research similar to Spotrank, but we want to ensure the privacy of our users," said Shannon Biggar, chief operating officer of Road Intelligence (path FDI) company in the UK. The company uses passive receivers to track mobile phone traces from shoppers and frequent concert visitors. The technology of the road Intelligence company can position the mobile terminal within the precision 1 to 2 meters, and keep track of the user moving through a region, so that the engineers can customers such as the store which stores often will be at the same time.　　By contrast, Sporrank data can only display a total number of people at any given time, but not effectively tracked. The Sensory network (Sense receptacle), a company supported by Sandy Pentland (Sandy Pentland), a computer professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Science, is also tracking population density. The company provides such data to other companies through an application called the Macro Sense. The company also provides a software called City Sense that can achieve data similar to Spotrank technology, but only within San Francisco.　　This summer, sensory networking companies are planning to provide developers with APIs, claiming that the data they provide will be more detailed, including geo-spatial data and related demographic data. Now, a handful of developers have started developing applications based on the location data provided by Spotrank to exploit their potential. Utkarsh Shrivastava, a master student at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has developed a search tool that Yutkasi Shrivastava local businesses based on data from various periods of time, combining spotrank data with Yahoo's corporate database. "At the same time it can be extended to a path based model," Shrivastava said.　　This will help users to choose the least-traffic way to destinations-now some GPS devices already include this feature. Joe Stump, co-founder of SimpleGeo, Chow Starp that developers now come up with a lot of good ideas for using Spotrank data development applications. "There's a whole bunch of ideas now around the potential variable pricing of advertising business," he said.　　The data will also be applied to local social networks such as Square Plaza (FourSquare), making it more useful and interesting, Stapp said. According to Spotrank's developers, their next goal is real-time data. Users will be able to view aThe city's "social weather" to determine whether it is holding a grand event. "The user can see the activity scene almost in real time, and add pictures and tweets with geographic location while watching the activity," said Skyhook's Morgan, "and we also offer a social compass that looks like a normal compass,　　But it can give users real-time guidance through the activity data of a region. However, even Spotrank's current geographic data, strictly historical data, are also useful because people's behavior is predictable. "With the past 24 months of historical data, we can tell you 90% of what will happen in Wednesday 2 o'clock in the morning," said Morgan, "and now, in every corner of the world, we're 99% sure we know what's going to happen." ”