Movement rather than Location

There’s a scene in the film Minority Report where the character played by Tom Cruise enters a Gap store and is greeted by a digital display that scans his retinas, identifies him, and presents him with a personalized welcome.  This sort of scene is not so futuristic - facial recognition is already being used to identify terrorists in large crowds.  Right now personalized tracking is mostly tied to cell phones and not to retinas - when I walk down the street my cell phone broadcasts where I am and applications like Foursquare and Google Maps can suggest places to get a bite to eat or products for sale nearby that I might be interested in. So the business opportunity is there to deliver a targeted marketing message based on the proximity of a potential customer to your product or service.

An even bigger opportunity is to use not just the location of an individual right now but the movement of many individuals as a statistical sample. Have you ever wondered how GPS mapping applications know where the traffic on your morning commute is backed up? They purchase aggregate data about how fast cell phones are moving along various streets and highways. Access to this same aggregated movement data can be invaluable in locating a new business. You can build the coffee shop on the morning’s busiest street corner; you can offer the lunch special at the day and time customers are most likely to be drawn by it. At a more micro level you can put the display of new stylish khaki pants in the part of the store that men aged 20 to 40 are most likely to walk through. As this technology advances, maybe someday you’ll even be able to tune your offering so that Tom Cruise himself stops by…