New Technology Provides Insights Into Populations Of Consumers And Their Behaviors
SpaceCurve CEO Dane Coyer says when his company began, there wasn’t a platform that could index space and time data collected from the physical world. He founded the company in 2009 that developed a solution — the origin of which was an attempt to organize data for Google Earth — that enables companies including retailers, real estate agencies, and advertising firms, to have insights into customers as well as potential customers.
Coyer explains since SpaceCurve’s work began to develop the platform, growth in the use of smartphones and sensor technology made the need to be able to analyze this data even more acute. SpaceCurve provides information on the behavior patterns of people at or near locations. “We take a position and turn it into data,” he says.
In the course of the analysis, individuals’ privacy is preserved and they remain anonymous. Information on individuals isn’t the goal of the solution. For example, data in a recent test included groups of sensor data per line, and there were one trillion lines of data analyzed.
“Up to now, people used small samples or small numbers of sensors to provide information,” Coyer comments. SpaceCurve can provide a view by day of week, time of day, season, or effectiveness of a current marketing campaign. “We can show 9:30 a.m. today versus the same time and day last year — or how your competitors look.” Companies also have the ability to get a more detailed look at the results of a query — for example, did millennials have breakfast at my restaurant or did they go to a competitor? And did an advertising promotion impact their behavior? Coyer says, in addition, companies can see where those customers went on their way to breakfast and how long they stayed there — which could help pinpoint the time an ad should appear on a digital billboard.
The solution is provided as-a-Service, and companies simply have to provide locations (by latitude and longitude or address) and the demographics they are interested in to generate results. Coyer is reluctant to call the results a “report”; clients can actually interact with the information — virtually asking questions and getting answers. They can also set triggers, so when a certain set of conditions is met, the platform sends them notifications. A subscription model, rather than a one-time analysis, is best to receive the full benefit of this solution. “It’s going to become the price of doing business,” Coyer comments, “to have insight.”
SpaceCurve currently sells direct, to clients, says Coyer, who are “sophisticated, large retailers.” Future plans include selling through the channel as well as forming new data partnerships.
For additional information on this technology, visit http://spacecurve.com/technology/.