Last night I was invited to talk to the Society for Location Analysis, a group of people who work in commercial property and for large retail chains using location intelligence to optimise their networks. It was a fun evening chatting with some people who make big decisions on the back of the tools that they use.
The gist of my talk was that the ubiquity of connectivity and location via smartphones combined with the content gathered from the mobile social games like foursquare and rummble offers a rich source of behavioural insights with location and temporal context.
It felt at times as if I was talking a foreign language to the folk from the supermarkets and banks but the discussion afterwards was along the lines of “how long do you think this will take?” (answer 3-5 years) and “who will write the algorithms to mine this data?” (the heavyweight data miners rather than the demographics companies).
The slides are here
One thought on “The crowd, the cloud and the iPhone”
Steven
it was a very interesting discussion – good to see you again and much food for thought. I am equally impressed that you remembered my idea about the video capture of car registrations. I recall at that time the DVLA had just been on Watchdog about mis-use of their car reg data and were consequently not very receptive to our idea!!