How do startups grasp the pulse of the global economy through crowdsourcing apps?

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Tencent Science and technology Tom October 16 compiled

In September this year, media reports said onion prices in the Indian region rose by 300% in just a year.

In this respect, market analysts have warned that the sudden sharp rise in retail prices for such foods may mean a financial crisis is about to hit. Meanwhile, the Indian Research Bank, India, also raised its deposit rate.

But a start-up company called "Premise" has helped India through the potential financial turmoil to some extent.

It is reported that the company daily through more than 700 users installed their own development applications to upload the various regional prices of different onions in real time. David Soloff, co-founder of Premise, believes this is an effective channel for real-time perception of global financial dynamics, as local stores generally adjust the price of goods in a timely fashion based on changes in the economic environment, including wholesale prices and consumer confidence.

"All of this information is ' hidden ' behind the price tag on the shelves, but we don't always have a way to perceive and aggregate that information in a timely fashion. Said David Slove.

Outside analysis, Slove's idea of this approach can indeed be traced quickly, even predicting such inflation indicators as the US Consumer Price index (U.S. Consumer). In general, inflation indicators have a huge impact on the financial sector and affect the local government's monetary and fiscal policies. However, the frequency of this indicator is usually updated once a month.

"The analytical approach presented by premise has shown that we can predict inflation indicators 4-6 weeks ahead of time in some economic environment based on the data we collect," Slove said. So there's no need to wait for the monthly ' economic weather forecast '. ”

Specifically, premise companies combine physical stores and online commodity prices to measure inflation in the U.S. economy. So far, premise has maintained a daily report on inflation data for reference, and premise continues to work even after the U.S. federal government shut down and announced a moratorium on official index data. Premise mainly by employing people in Latin America and Asian urban areas, including China and India, to provide their own real-time product price data in local physical retail outlets.

Slove explains: "Many financial institutions and consumer product companies are interested in food or consumer price indicators for certain commodities." In these emerging economies, they have little choice, and our job is to build a financial map for them. ”

Business model

It is reported that premise hired people every morning through their own Android smartphone installation of the official application received a daily "to do", they were asked to go to a specific store to record the price of certain items, and then take photos as evidence.

These employees are paid 5 to 15 cents each time they record the price of a product, and their maximum daily workload is likely to reach 250. Premise hopes these people can spend hours a day doing the work, using the rest of the time to go to work, or continue their college studies.

Of course, premise can also send different instructions to its personnel on a daily basis according to the different requirements of the client company. Slove revealed that many consumer products companies are willing to pay for the actual data performance of their own or competitor's products in the market. Currently, premise has collaborated with many consumer product companies and has begun to provide real-time information to a number of financial institutions, including Bloomberg.

Moreover, premise has received financial support from Harrison Metal Capital, the US renowned VC company Anderson-Horowitz (Andreessen Horowitz) and Google (Weibo) VCs. At the same time, the company hired Google's chief economist, Hal Varian, as a corporate advisor.

Alberto-Carvalho (Alberto Cavallo), an assistant professor of science and technology at MIT and a co-founder of the PriceStats Company, which tracks up to 70 national product lines, says premise's data can help companies, The research institution can effectively track the trend of product price and show the inherent financial trend of the change of commodity price in a certain sense.

Future prospects

However, Carvalho also believes premise needs to ensure that the price data for each item uploaded by its personnel are accurate. Because there have been some other types of mobile apps that want to keep track of changes in commodity prices, it's easy for users to mix different versions of the same product while recording prices and submit incorrect data.

"This may be the biggest challenge for crowdsourcing models, and if they can control this and find ways to keep local personnel in the correct product pricing method, the model used by premise will be of very high value." "Carvalho said.

In this regard, Slove said he is very confident that the company to achieve this goal, because he has to avoid this situation has set up a multi-level quality management process. For example, premise employees receive a complete set of training before they are actually on duty, and premise can modify a data based on the location of the person and the metadata uploaded by other local people.

In addition, the company is testing technology that uses image-processing software to automatically match goods and prices. Outside analysis, if this technology is finally proved to be feasible, the accuracy of real-time price data will be greatly increased, and it is possible to provide more value-added services to premise future. For example, the future of image analysis processing technology may be able to detect the freshness of the food in the supermarket, or on the shelves of which commodity inventory is too low.

It is worth mentioning that, in addition to the traditional financial sector, the data collected by premise may be used in a wider range of areas. Carvalho's PriceStats company, for example, is currently involved in a national project called Global Pulse, PriceStats, which is mainly responsible for the provision of bread price indicators for several Latin American countries. These data can effectively predict future market movements and help governments and entrepreneurs to be aware of possible financial crises in advance. In the same way, premise's data are fully justified by using similar patterns to be used more efficiently.

"This data can be used to monitor price movements in other parts of the world, such as Africa, where online price data are often unreliable." Carvalho said at last.