SpaceCurve and AirSage Partner on Customer Location Data Offering
SpaceCurve, a spatial analytics platform company, and AirSage, a provider of population analytics and consumer location and population movement intelligence, have teamed up to offer companies a solution for modeling a more complete understanding of consumer behavior based on time, location, motion, sensor data, and other attributes.
Each day, AirSage uses patented technology to capture and analyze more than 15 billion anonymous, real-time, cellular-signal data points that can provide insights into consumers' real-world travel patterns. Top-tier wireless carriers provide AirSage with signaling data from their subscribers' mobile devices. This typically amounts to between 50 and 250 sightings per day, per device.
The SpaceCurve platform is able to ingest, index, and fuse millions of those complex spatial data records per second in real time and then make that data immediately available to businesses for action.
Through the partnership, SpaceCurve will take AirSage's mobile device location data and fuse it with diverse location-enabled data sources, such as weather and environmental conditions, traffic patterns, maps, census and demographic information, and more, to provide companies with a better understanding of consumer behaviors.
"We can see at a particular time where devices were located, where they've been over time, and what was happening at those locations," says Dane Coyer, CEO of SpaceCurve.
Coyer is quick to point out, though, that all of the data collected and analyzed is anonymous. Unlike Apple's iBeacon and other location-specific technologies, "AirSage is about populations and their migration paths rather than an individual view of a particular subscriber," he says.
More detailed tracking of individual customers is possible, but those customers would have to opt-in to allow their locations to be tracked and to have that information shared with businesses.
The geospatial data, Coyer maintains, is "extremely difficult to process," but once analyzed and aggregated, "can reveal some pretty significant insights."
The data, he adds, can be particularly useful for hospitality managers, who can use it to better evaluate the guest experience, including where guests go during their stays, the wait times at those sites, purchase decisions, kiosk usage, dining choices, service selections, transportation usage, and other activities and services used inside and outside the location during their stays.
Retailers can use the information to see where customers go inside their stores, but can also build on that with data about where they go when they leave the store or where they were before entering the store to see what attracts them to the location.
The data can also be useful for entertainment companies, theme park operators, transportation providers, and logistics companies, Coyer adds.
According to Coyer, the CRM implications of this information are many. "The fact that there are billions of sensors around the world is fundamentally changing the CRM landscape," he says. "Being able to make sense of all that sensor and environmental and population data could have a profound impact on CRM."
"Companies and organizations have been clamoring for big data to deliver on the promise of the ability to analyze the complex flow of populations, goods, and commerce within the context of time and space. To truly unlock the value of this data, the analysis needs to be performed continuously, at the exact time events occur, and at a global scale. Enabling this capability is like analytical superfood, and SpaceCurve and AirSage combined have disrupted the market with a very powerful solution," said Robin Bloor, chief analyst at the Bloor Group, in a statement.