What would Google look like if you took it offline and forced it to set up in physical space?
Google's tens of thousands of commodity Linux servers would need to be scattered around the globe so as to collect and then aggregate consumer interest. A lot like Path Intelligence, in other words.
Tim O'Reilly invested in Path Intelligence back in 2007. After lunching with Path Intelligence CEO Toby Oliver Friday in London, I can see why. The idea is to set up receivers in shopping malls and other retail areas to collect mobile data and analyze consumer behavior to help optimize lease rates, retail setups, etc. It's a big idea. Huge, even.
But it's what comes after this initial phase that has my brain hopping.
Path Intelligence Mobile Receiver
(Credit: Path Intelligence)Path Intelligence's initial phase could prove somewhat costly, as it seems to require a sales force and hardware development/assembly to gain a critical mass of property owners to adopt its service. (The software, based on the open-source GNU Radio project, is free, which helps to keep costs down.)
But once Path Intelligence has a reasonable amount of distribution, the network effect of its business is absolute manna from heaven.
Just like Google.
Importantly, Path Intelligence is highly useful to retailers and others that want to optimize physical space (for retail, conferences/exhibitions, or whatever), even if the company never acquires another customer. If I'm an asset manager and want to know the most highly trafficked location in my shopping malls (e.g., so that I know where to charge the highest rent), I can easily get that data from Path Intelligence's service.
It dawned on me, however, that once a critical mass is attained, Path Intelligence can start selling subscriptions for the data to marketers everywhere, and could even start offering targeted advertisements to consumers while they're shopping. If I'm Ralph Lauren, I want to know that customers at Nordstrom who stop at the Faconnable display never make it to my displays, and then negotiate with Nordstrom to change my position.
And if I'm shopping at The Gap, I'd love to get an SMS ad that suggests I head to H&M for $10 off (perhaps sparked by data in the Path Intelligence system suggesting that a significant percentage of shoppers who go to The Gap later move on to H&M). It's good for me, and good for the retailer.
If this sounds like a privacy nightmare, Path Intelligence isn't blase about the issue. All information collected is anonymous and Oliver told me the company refuses business with organizations that may want to take a Big Brother approach to the data.
Google's advertising machine works because users constantly tell Google what they want. Path Intelligence, in physical space, is much the same.
It's a Very Big Idea, and very similar to Google. At scale, Google is unbelievably powerful because of the data that powers it. At scale, Path Intelligence could be the same.
Importantly, however, Google is useful to companies that simply want to search their internal documents or Web sites, just as Google Desktop is useful to individuals who want to unlock the clutter on their machines. Path Intelligence is immediately useful to retailers and property managers, but it becomes even more powerful once it has a sufficient body of data coursing through its servers.
Path Intelligence has just started raising its next round of funding. It's still in its early stages, but that's what makes it so exciting.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
The launch of Apple's iPhone 3G S has justifiably caught the media's attention, what with its elegant design and speedy performance. But for all the noise that Apple is making in mobile, open source--not Apple--may well be doing the most to define the future of mobile communications, as two leading open-source projects suggest.
No, I'm not talking about the Palm Pre, with its Linux-based operating system and its new open-source applications portal. Nor am I referring to Google Android.
Rather, I'm referring to the InSTEDD project, which The Economist recently highlighted, as well as GNU Radio, the project made popular by Path Intelligence, a company I've profiled before on CNET.
Both companies/projects are interesting because they treat mobile as a data source, not as a computer.
In the case of InSTEDD (Innovative Support to Emergencies, Diseases and Disasters), it's a nonprofit that helps developing nations coordinate disaster relief efforts by helping relief agencies share, aggregate, and analyze data from mobile phones.
InSTEDD's GeoChat technology accomplishes this by enabling mobile phone users to broadcast alerts ("Typhoon has hit our city"), but it becomes even more interesting when combined with InSTEDD's Mesh4x technology:
Mesh4x allows information to flow between established applications (like Excel, Access, GoogleEarth, MySQL, Oracle and many others), and between devices (laptops, smartphones, PDAs, and servers) reliably, selectively, and securely in a distributed "data mesh". If necessary, Mesh4X can synchronize data over nothing but a stream of SMS messages, merely by plugging an ordinary cellphone into a laptop.
While InSTEDD has open-sourced the technology to help improve disaster relief, it's not hard to see how the technology could be used for commercial applications.
Indeed, this is what Path Intelligence has done with GNU Radio. GNU Radio describes itself as a "free software development toolkit that provides the signal processing runtime and processing blocks to implement software radios using readily available, low-cost external RF hardware and commodity processors." Sounds complicated, right?
Well, in the hands of Path Intelligence, such mobile data becomes a way to track consumers through a shopping mall, for example, so as to identify which marketing displays are most effective, the best places to locate high-margin products, etc. While the company is primarily focused on such a retail application today, its markets are much broader.
Neither InSTEDD nor Path Intelligence makes a shiny device that people will covet and buy. Both, however, can use those shiny devices to generate, aggregate, and analyze data that can save the world...or a company's bottom line.
In this way, these open-source projects, even more than Apple, may well prove to be the cutting edge of mobile. It's all about the data.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
For this next (and twelfth) installment in the Open Source CEO Series, I looked a bit farther afield, both in terms of geography and in terms of mindshare. Toby Oliver, CEO of Path Intelligence, is based in Portsmouth, England, where he and his wife, Sharon, have built a hugely interesting (and innovative) product on top of the GNU Radio open source project, key parts of which they've helped to fund.
Name, position, and company of executive
Toby Oliver, CEO and Co-founder, Path Intelligence. ... Read more
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