A new company has launched an alpha version of a platform that can show the location-based trends of consumers in real time. New York City-based Sense Networks publicly announced itself as a company Monday — along with its patent-pending software platform, Macrosense, and the platform’s first application: a real-time social-navigation and “nightlife-discovery application” called Citysense.
For BlackBerry Devices Only — for Now
Citysense is available now for download from the company’s Web site, but initially only for BlackBerry handhelds. The company said an iPhone version will be available soon.
Greg Skibiski, the company’s CEO and cofounder, said the Macrosense platform “enables an entirely new business model for location-based services,” which other company officials are describing as “social navigation.”
He added that the new model is made possible by companies and investors making money from “understanding emerging trends in real time, while consumers receive compelling applications free of intrusive mobile advertising” and are able to remain anonymous.
The way Macrosense accomplishes this is by collecting massive amounts of location data that is sent, anonymously, from mobile phones and vehicles. Machine-learning technology is employed to analyze the data, with each data point being evaluated in the context of other data from the same location. The data consists of time-stamped location data, and metadata streams from GPS, Wi-Fi positioning, cell-tower triangulation, RFID, and other sources to provide what the company calls its “predictive analytics.”
Initially in San Francisco
The company said this kind of real-time information, plus historical data, enables the platform to quantify consumer behavior and show “macro trends in spending and sentiment,” in real time. These trends enable companies to answer such questions as: Where do its customers go after a transaction? How far will people be willing to travel to a store compared to last year? Where do most of the customers at a given location come…