Sense Networks: 4 Million Sensors to Help You Find a Party in San Francisco
Yesterday we discussed MIT's project WikiCity, which monitors location data in cities via mobile sensors and creates visualizations from that. That project comes out of the SENSEable City lab at MIT and in our post we questioned whether there is any practical value in WikiCity currently or if it is simply "info porn". In this post we look at a commercial company that is doing much of the same thing by using data mining and real time analytics and trying to make a business from that. The company is Sense Networks and its stated aim is to index the real world "using real-time and historical location data for predictive analytics across multiple industries." Sense Networks was founded by top computer scientists from MIT and Columbia University.
Sense Networks has a platform, called Macrosense, that "receives streaming location data in real-time, analyzes and processes the data in the context of billions of historical data points, and stores it in a way that can be easily queried to better understand aggregate human activity." The company has so far built one consumer product on top of this platform: Citysense, an iPhone and Blackberry app that allows people in San Francisco to see the most happening nightlife in real time. Citysense currently accesses cell-phone and taxi GPS data from about four million GPS sensors, to see where the local hot spots are. It then links to Yelp and Google to show what venues are operating at popular locations. The product is currently only available in San Francisco, but a New York version is coming soon.
Citysense isn't the only such app doing this, there are currently a lot of location-based social networking plays. They include "social compass" service Loopt (our review), Nokia-owned Plazes (our review), Pelago's Whrrl, ULocate, and GyPSii. Probably our favorite right now is mobile social network app Brightkite, which at the end of last year we named our Most Promising startup for 2009. All of these apps offer something unique. For example Brightkite relies on actions from its user base to make it useful, whereas Citysense's strength is its 4 million sensors and the aggregate data it derives and analyzes from those.
Sense Networks was the subject of a recent review by MIT's Technology Review publication, which described how the next release of Citysense will show "not only where people are gathering in real time, but where people with similar behavioral patterns - students, tourists, or businesspeople, for instance - are congregating." So we can see that Citysense is slowly evolving into a social networking tool, like Brightkite. In the next release Citysense will categorize people into "tribes" - so far 20 tribes have been identified, including "young and edgy," "business traveler," "weekend mole," and "homebody." In order to do this, Sense Networks not only uses GPS data, but company address data and demographic data about people from the U.S. Census Bureau.
The company's monetization plans are predictably centered around location-based mobile advertising. This involves providing GPS data about city activity to advertisers, however the company insists that it will be aggregate data only - so user privacy is maintained. The user also can turn off the tracking and delete their existing data. An example of how advertising could work, via Technology Review, is data showing that "a particular demographic heads to bars downtown between 6 and 9 P.M. on weekdays. Advertisers could then tailor ads on a billboard screen to that specific crowd."
We think this is a good example of how sensors and mobile data are being used to provide real value to consumers. Let us know other examples you've come across lately.
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Wow. Hooking our digital identities, our very GPS-mediated selves into the body politic, "tagging" or "branding" ourselves via Citysense tribes, the better to reflect and act thereon, if one chooses...
Humans could not do this before. It amazes me, another transitional phenomenon in the web 2.0 world.
Demographics for visual learners, a way to chart the herd as it happens and as one is in it, one sees" one's tribal self, in situ, and make individual decisions accordingly. Amazing!
In the same way, Twitter is making the voices I'm listening to increasingly coherent, based upon ever-greater informationmy increasingly web-mediated self hearkens to signals amid the noise it gets from trusted Twitter followees of "everyone."
sensors and mobile data are being used to provide real value to consumers., Let us know other examples you've come across lately.
This idea is crazy...
Nice post on tech stuff.It would be interesting if any niche we can see on ipod that their are gatehering or doing somekind of activity.great work man
Demographics for visual learners, a way to chart the herd as it happens and as one is in it, one sees" one's tribal self, in situ, and make individual decisions accordingly. Amazing!
Those monetization plans are so laughable. Any advertiser who's been around for some time could teach those systems a lesson or two about when and what "demographic" heads to bars downtown.
Seems like a case when developers are blinded by shiny technicality. Info-porn, definitely.
Want to make it a real business? Add analysis and simulations, optimizations for city planning and traffic management. Sell it to municipalities. What? Oh, you say it has nothing to do with your social iphone thingy? well...
Nice article, Richard!
A more ego-centric approach was done last year by my friend Stephan Baumann (@hr_b) with his Urban Sync project (http://urbansync.wordpress.com/about).
"Urban Sync aims at finding the correlates which define personal well-being in an urban context." It does so by recording explicit and implicit live-data in a multi-modal manner: "Equipped with a portabel MP3-recorder to record urban sound, a smartband to collect physiological data (heart rate, skin conductance response) as well as locative data (GPS) and a commodity device to scan electronic smog (signals of GHz networks) I document the multimodal input of urban signals encountered over the course of an hour, a day, a week in different cities world-wide."
Stephan was partially funded by EU COST ACTION SID (Sonic Interaction Design). The recorded data is available to all number crunchers out there.
Imagine this as a not tomorrow's but next week's Twitter with ppl streaming not only 140 chars but multi-modally and both explicitly and implicitly to their followers!
Cheers,
Alex @alexkorth
Thanks Richard, I think monetizing around geolocation is a great idea - but I think unless users opt-in you won't be able to get the best demographics. That is why a social-network based on location or presence is key but you have to offer users something that they want, and users want to be able to access all their friends from other social networks without having to go search for them. IRL Connect (www.irlconnect.com) is a presence-based social network that allows users to see their friends from Twitter and Facebook on the map and interact with them. IRL Connect Enterprise is allowing businesses to do this with the future being - monetizing the geo objects on the map (http://corp.irlconnect.com/index.php?page=irl-enterprise). IRL Connect is planning to launch its public beta on April 21, but if you'd like to try it out now - go to www.irlconnect.com and use the invite key: SENSEIT
Also at www.irlconnect.com you can play the launch game and win a Nintendo Wii!
I'd be interested to hear what you think about IRL.
seems like an amazing idea, especially if it featured recommendation engines for places and events to visit based on the tribe you belong to.
Sense is onto something in terms of mining for patterns at the tribe (macro) level. But here's an example of a similar service at the individual (micro) level. Abaqus Inc. has launched a service called MyGeoDiary (www.mygeodiary.com) where users can record GPS tracks (via phone or personal navigation device). Using the service, it is instructive to see the kinds of patterns that emerge from personal, work and social logs. This data is for personal use only. Users can keep it private or publish it to any web site they choose (geotag the web).
Use geo-locations and 'tribal' connections to better determine what advertising to place at a given location? That has been done since the dawn of media. Why was Studio 54 a super popular party spot in the 70's? Because Playboy showed the 'hip and beautiful' people going there. It became so popular, that the hip left and the Studio became a wannabe hangout and finally a tourist trap. The beautiful ran elsewhere and the sheep continue to chase. Will the 'truly hip and beautiful' allow their positions to be logged real time so that the sheep are on them before their first drink is empty? More likely Madison Ave will simply spoof the system by paying college kids $20 to converge at a location of their choice on Friday night, thereby 'pulling in' the wired sheep. Call your friends and make wherever you go beautiful!
Interesting concept, but I think there is a downside even if the data is de-identified, depending on the resolution with which crowds can be pinpointed. Of course, on the upside, they could re-brand it iJihad and sell it to Al Qaeda...