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Name: Placed
Quick Pitch: A service that lets marketers and app developers analyze location data.
Genius Idea: Contextualizing data about a user's location for free to provide a better understanding about how our digital lives overlap with our physical ones.
Being mobile and connected has made life a lot easier and more enjoyable, from checking your email on the go, to playing games with your friends and checking in to your favorite restaurants. Mobile devices can tell us a lot about our habits, and with smartphones and tablets becoming ubiquitous, there's a ton of data to go through. Making sense of that data, however, isn't as easy. That's where Placed comes in.
Placed is a new service that analyzes location data and contextualizes it, giving developers useful information to improve their apps and our mobile experience. Here's how it works.
The Placed service first collects location data only on an opt-in basis. Placed is commited to protecting users' privacy so the service doesn't collect any location data without explicit permission. Also Placed doesn't use the data it collects for ads, just analytics for its customers. Once a user opts-in, Placed will start to receive location data like latitude, longitude and orientation.
"People weren't taking advantage of what makes mobile unique and that's location," CEO David Shim told Mashable. "We're all about understanding location and diving into the data."
Placed adds a layer of metadata to nearby places, like a business category and hours of operation. Data is then run through what Shim describes as an inference modeling process, which contextualizes your app's location data so you can make sense of it. At the end of the process, developers who use Placed get a location analytics report which gives them insights on everything from what time of day users are actively using their app to which businesses they frequent when their app is running. One Placed customer was able to use the service to learn 42% of his users were using his app in a car. That led to added voice controls in app, improving the user experience and functionality of the app.
Placed can impact marketing and ad sales departments. Because Placed analytics can be categorized by several metrics, like time of day, nearby location, and in-app event, these teams can make inferences about their app they weren't able to do before. For instance, which type of stores are users visting the most? Placed tracks 200 different categories so that marketing teams can get a better sense of who to partner with and which businesses would be appropriate advertisers.
Placed debuted about three months ago but its already processing around 2.3 billion locations, Shim tells Mashable. The service is availalble for use with iOS and Android apps and is free to use.
Are you an app developer or marketer? Tell us what you think of Placed in the comments below.
Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark
The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.
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