imran*ali

This year’s ETech 2009 seemed to have a unique focus on mobile and locative analytics – I’ve already covered Path Intelligence’s work on Measuring Offline Reality and there was an intriguing session from Molly Steenson on the ethnographics of shared phones in urban India.

Perhaps one of the most intriguing takes on this area was Tony Jabra’s Mobile Phones Reveal the Behaviour of Places and People and the work of SenseNetworks in ‘indexing the real world’ using location data.

The data is drawn from cellphones and taxi GPS units, then rendered to a ‘heat map’ showing the most vibrant parts of a city. Recent feature additions not only show this vibrancy, but also seeks to find where people with similar movement patterns might be; acting as a civic-scale, locative collaborative filter.

This kind of predictive technology could be a boon to advertisers and marketeers – reaching people by understanding their intentional behaviors. Indeed, the analytical and predictive technology is so strong, the company asserts that it can calculate the probability of a subject visiting a particular type of location – such as a coffee shop.

Read recollections of Jabra’s talk from O’Reilly’s Robert Kaye and Quinn Norton.