Andrea Vaccari's Profile

Another DNR application works in a similar way to capture locations where tagged fish were caught: you zoom in until you can click on the exact point of the lake or river where you found the fish, then enter a code found on the fish's tag and other relevant details.

In Italy's Tuscan province of Arezzo a new GIS system, announced at the 2008 GFOSS day in Italy will soon let selected, registered citizens enter more complex geographic data. Single professionals and employees of environmental or professional associations will be able to draw single points and polygons to enter the exact location, shape, and approximate area of several landscape features or hazards, such as natural resources and landfills with environmental or geologic hazards.

"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.

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.

TomTom, the Dutch manufacturer of GPS devices, has been using cell-phone data to provide up-to-the-second traffic information in Western Europe since late 2007. "We're able to have almost complete visibility" of the roads, says Tom Murray, the company's vice president of market development. "It's a game-changing, killer application that rounds out our portfolio of navigation tools."

Drivers carrying cell phones are creating a wealth of data about average traffic conditions, allowing Eric Horvitz, a computer scientist with Microsoft's research department, to concoct something he calls "surprise modeling." There's no point in being told that Highway 101 in San Francisco is backed up at 6:30 on Friday—the 101 is always backed up at 6:30 on Friday. The useful information is when the road is uncharacteristically crowded, or remarkably clear. "The idea is to harness [these datasets] to let me know in advance of a surprise coming," he says. Inrix, spun off from Microsoft in 2004, provides this kind of information to navigation companies and mapping programs.

Say a jazz group plays a 10 p.m. set at a downtown bar. Using the location data they've collected, Skibiski and his researchers can see where all the jazz aficionados ate dinner before the show, and what kind of late-night clubs they visit after the trumpets hit the final high C. They're putting the jazz club—and, by extension, its patrons—in the context of the rest of the city.

Sense Networks has raised $3 million from financiers like Steven Drobny. As Sense began developing its algorithms, the moneymen saw an opportunity to use them for stock-picking. "We can use [our models] to predict retail demand," says Skibiski. "How many people are coming to Macy's versus Saks versus Nordstrom?" Since mid-2006, the firm has used location data from San Francisco to operate a trading portfolio. "It's in the green," says Skibiski, "so something's working."

For this reason, Pentland (a cofounder of Sense Networks) has called for a "New Deal on data." That means, in part, treating data a lot more like personal property—it is owned by the person who originates it, but companies can borrow it. "You should think of data roughly the way you think of money," he says. "It's something you own, it's something you can loan to people, but you want to get something back" in exchange for it, such as a more useful search engine or real-time traffic information.

A skilled reality miner could use cell-phone data to pinpoint buildings or blocks where a higher than average proportion of people are at home on a workday. That, in turn, might imply an outbreak of influenza or another contagious disease. The benefits of using this method are enormous—doctors and epidemiologists could track the spread of an illness nearly in real time, and perhaps even issue warnings in communities where infected people have traveled.

This might be even more influential in the developing world, where data on all kinds of variables, from population to health, is scarce to nonexistent (but cell phones are plentiful). Developing-world governments could employ reality miners to assess the growth of informal developments like slums, or find out which neighborhoods are less likely to make use of an AIDS clinic. It could, in short, replace the raft of contradictory, costly and sometimes inaccurate polls, censuses and surveys that much of public policy relies on.

Kinetic, the outdoor advertising unit of ad giant WPP, studied Sense's data in San Francisco and saw that one tribe frequented bars in the Marina district where a certain beer promotion (which it will not disclose) did well. They pushed the beer company to extend the promotion to other bars in the city that attracted dots of the same color. The early results look promising.

While phone companies have long had a line on customer behavior, the applications add crucial perspective by pointing directly to each person's interests and needs. (Barflies, Sense researchers found, spend more time than others playing an alcohol-themed game on their handsets.) "All of a sudden we have this incredibly rich information on how and where people use their mobile applications," says Ted Morgan, chief executive of Skyhook Wireless, a provider of tracking technology.

It's also becoming easier to pick up a handset's digital trail. Traditionally, wireless carriers have marked our wanderings only by the nearby cell towers receiving our signals. Each phone, even at rest, stays in touch with those towers so it can send and receive calls. But the towers can miss a person's location by several hundred yards. Satellites are more precise, but they often don't work when people are under roofs. Many of the latest phones, including the iPhone, have Wi-Fi, the radio signals used in home networks. These signals often can pinpoint someone within 33 feet.

General Motors (GM) provides an early example. Some 5.5 million subscribers in North America pay for its OnStar (GM) global positioning service. They're willing to supply data on their whereabouts in exchange for safety and convenience. With a phone, far more possibilities open up. An Amazon.com (AMZN) application lets users take photos with their iPhones of things they'd like to buy. Amazon's computer promptly searches for each item. When it finds a match, it lets the user know the lowest price and nearest location. In the process, Amazon gains data on the movements and habits of its most zealous customers.

Sense's hedge fund investors—the company does not name them—want to study the mobile data to get a leg up on macroeconomic trends. How is traffic at key malls? Is that struggling retailer attracting customers with its new marketing campaign? "Usually you get store sales data with a couple weeks' lag," says one of the investors. "If you get real-time data on traffic to stores, this could be epic—especially if you have it and nobody else does. Pair that with MasterCard (MA) data, and you've got some pretty meaty stuff."

Some companies are rewriting their business plans based on the possibilities for location-based services. Nokia, the leading cell-phone maker, faces a slumping global market, with phone shipments expected to fall 5% to 10% this year. But perhaps no outfit has access to more location data on hundreds of millions of people. By working with Sense to study people's movements, their tribes, the photos they take, and the applications they use, Nokia is betting it will come up with customized suggestions on everything from walking routes to boutiques. All of them would be linked to a map on the phone. Money would come from subscriptions or advertising.