Usually the first considerations when a company acquires another is how to realize economies of scale, cross-marketing opportunities, and areas of common improvement. If one knew which shoppers visit each location and quantified the cross-visits between malls then they could make educated decisions about which malls to focus on for improvements, tenant acquisition, or cross marketing. With traditional measuring methods this is hard to achieve, but cellphone location data is the perfect fit for such an exercise.

It 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.