LOGINIt comes in many forms: Speech. Movement. Draw within the lines. Wait, scratch that last one.
We didn’t like that last one either. When it comes to measuring foot traffic, trade areas, migration patterns, demographics, cross traffic, and in general get behavioral metrics from mobile location data, yesterday’s state of the art was to get canned results on some buildings or venues someone else has decided you might be interested in.
What’s the reason for the limitation? In two words: Big Data. When you are dealing with billions of data points you can’t just write a query to extract any information you want because it will be very slow and very costly (sometimes in the hundreds of thousands of dollars).
It’s even worse in our case because we have 6 trillion cellphone observations over the last 5 years! And growing at a rate of over half a trillion every quarter. Gulp.
But the ability to draw any area, be it a building, a retail location, a factory, an oil field, a neighborhood, you name it, and get instant foot traffic measurements for it was making us loose too much sleep. A sure sign we had to do something about it.
So after several months of head scratching, experimentation, optimization, design, testing, design again, and all the other sleep-reducing activities favored by software engineers, we built a tool to be able to do just that. If you thought we would have shown it to the whole world the very next day, you would be right, but... once a nerd always a nerd. It took us 2 full years to open it up to our clients. Well, better late than ever...
So finally last month we announced REveal, a self service website where the user gets full control of the data.
- Draw it:
- Recite your favorite poem, and voila! True Home Trade area:
- Want to find out where those living in a building you are considering buying work?
- And how has that changed over time?
- What is the true trade area of this Mall?
- Where do the visitors live and work?
- Are more people moving into this allegedly hot neighborhood, or is it all hype?
And on and on. The possibilities are truly endless.
As recently as 10 years ago it would be unfathomable to think that you can crunch 2 Petabytes of data (that’s 2 Million Gigabytes!) in seconds and get detailed answers to any question you can think of. Progress is sometimes pretty close to science fiction!
- Spock: Over and out.
