Big Data Highlights from McKinsey: Personal Location Data

McKinsey Company have just released a report on the emerging future of big data. Given that so much has been written about big data in business circles, it’s very refreshing to see an study of this length. Here at CTOVision, we’ll be looking at bite-sized pieces of interest to CTOs and CIOs. Given our focus on mobile device management and mobile apps, it’s very heartening to see that McKinsey has looked specifically at the potential of personal location data to generate value.

McKinsey has estimated that the growing penetration of mobile devices with GPS-enabled tracking can enable a range of geolocation based services, valued at an estimated $100 billion over the next ten years. Personal location data is a function of the growth of smartphone penetration,as 2010 saw the use of 600 million devices with a projected growth rate of 20 percent per year. But this is far more than just more people with mobile devices–it’s also stronger personal location technologies that can determine personal location from within buildings where GPS signals are very weak. Location data is becoming more accurate and useful, especially to mobile developers:

Services such as Skyhook have mapped the physical location of various Wi-Fi networks that broadcast their identity (service set identifier, or SSID) and therefore allow a mobile device to correlate the Wi-Fi networks it detects with a physical location. …. Shopkick is a mobile phone application that allows merchants to track their customers from the moment they walk into a store by picking up inaudible sounds emitted by in-store devices on the mobile phone’s microphone. Another example of such innovation is UK-based company Path Intelligence, which can track foot traffic within malls or amusement parks by passively monitoring identification signals sent by individual mobile phones.

Some existing and projected applications for personal location data the report covers:

Smart routing providing advanced internal navigation systems with up-to-date information on road and weather conditions, also providing reams of data to a central server that can better measure and analyze the dynamics of congestion.
Mobile phone location-based services like Loopt, geotargeted advertising, collaborative augmented reality gaming, and collaborative military simulations and gaming.
Electronic toll collection- imagine “a mobile phone [that] could locate the vehicle and tollbooth, pay the toll, and charge it to the user’s phone bill, eliminating the need for separate transponder devices and additional bill payment accounts.”
Vehicle telematics (GPS systems that are truly “smart” in their ability to send and receive data) that enable more efficient emergency response and more accurate insurance pricing based on user behavior analytics,
Granular data for urban planners, designers, and retailers on congestion and flow dynamics in both large and small-scale systems ranging from the local traffic stop to an entire mall complex.
Business intelligence based on data on shopping patterns, traffic density, and speed matched with existing big data information on demographics and historical trends.