The Really Smart Phone

The world is finally starting to take notice of how significant it is that everyone has these handheld computers in their pockets all day long. The amount of data that is being harnessed by apps today is impressive, but over the next few years, I think the market for this information is going to be enormous. I wonder who will "own" the information. I assume it will be the network providers.

They are going to need tools to make sense of the information they have. They have very detailed information on their phone users, but they'll have to think through how they can monetize the information legally. Could we see these companies developing the ability to say, "the user of the cell phone X, who is a 14 year-old girl, spent 2 hours in this store on this day". That data on an aggregate basis could be very valuable to companies--companies that would be willing to pay for this kind of insight. "We noticed a spike in teenage girls visiting your stores in the northeast within a day after launching your ad campaign. It didn't have as large of a spike in this region of the country however." I think investors would be willing to buy this kind of information too. Imagine the edge a hedge fund would have if they had this sort of insight into consumer trends.

I suspect there will be a huge need for tools to analyze and make sense of the data that this new market will demand. I'm sure there are already some startups headed down this path, and I'm sure large communication companies would rather use a vendor for this data analysis than learn to do it themselves.

I think this is definitely the edge of a huge new market.

Funnily enough, I'm one of the people mentioned in this article, and we're a 3 person startup making this real.

You can see the appeal of http://color.com to VCs.

This is amazing data, and I expect that much more research is coming our way. It would be interesting to speculate on what kind of databases might be needed.

Isaac Asimov's Foundation, anyone?

Despite my deep desire to see a big budget adaptation of World War Z, the truly most relevant zombie fiction of today is Stephen King's Cell.

How would one get involved in this sort of programming/research? I basically want to understand the world (of humans) as a whole, the really big picture, and this kind of thing is right up my alley. I'm thinking I should learn R and statistics, but what else? I already study history intensively.