A Trillion Points of Data

Next time you glance at your BlackBerry, it may be useful to know you're not only checking e-mail, you're making a contribution to the central nervous system of the world. A mobile phone is, after all, a kind of sensor: every time you send a text message, make a phone call, or download an e-mail, cellular towers pinpoint your position.

With 4 billion handsets in use worldwide, that makes for trillions of data points flowing through the network every month and creating digital graphs of our paths through time and space. When aggregated, those individual paths convey a picture of a block, a community, a city—even a whole society. As Sandy Pentland, a professor at MIT's Media Lab, puts it, our cell phones have become the neurons in "an emerging—and truly global—nervous system."

Until recently, the information cascading out of our mobiles has been more or less ignored. In the past two years, however, there's been a paradigm shift as mobile companies seek new sources of revenue and smarter, more powerful phones embolden a new generation of software designers. Taken together, these pressures have cracked the data vault. Established companies such as Nokia, Microsoft and Google, as well as ambitious startups and academic researchers, are beginning to interpret the data sloughing off our digital selves. They're doing for real-world sites what the first Internet search companies did for Web sites in the late 1990s: index them, chart their relationships, and in the process learn about the people who move between them.

As the world descends into the biggest financial trough in a generation, this fresh technology provides a glimpse of a way forward.

The search-engine comparison is apt for another reason. Although few predicted it, the Web search industry became a goliath, and its leader, Google, quickly became the business success story of the early-21st century. Experts expect our digital selves to increasingly center on the mobile phone, and as this shift happens, savvy businesses sense an opportunity. "Mobile is really the next frontier" for technology-oriented businesses, says Charles Golvin, an analyst with Forrester Research. "If you look at the next 1 to 3 billion online users, these people are going to be online on phones," making location an essential new data point for aspiring Googles to consider. Last year, for instance, Nokia spent $8.1 billion to buy digital mapmaker Navquest. It was the largest acquisition in the history of Finland, where Nokia is based, and a sign that the company is looking to become a player in the location game. "For us, it's a very ambitious and necessary move," says Michael Halbherr, vice president of social location services for the company. "People believe there's this magic box, this one box solving every problem on the planet," he says in reference to Google. But adding location into the mix changes everything, including search. "We want to create an ecosystem of services that connect people to people and people to places in new ways," he says.

Search is only the beginning. Location data will give marketers and advertisers new insight into consumers. Financiers are using it to predict retail trends and inform their stock trades. And researchers say that understanding the movements of people within a city block or neighborhood will enable policymakers to craft more effective government programs, and provide early indicators of a disease outbreak or other public hazard.

The best example of a problem with a clear need for real-time location data is traffic congestion. Road-side cameras and underground sensors already snoop on current traffic conditions, but those systems are too costly to ever be truly pervasive. By lassoing cell phones, navigation companies can have access to instantaneous, near-universal coverage.