“Mobile phone technology has transformed the way we live.”

The accuracy of this statement is explored in this article and the way that technology has advanced with mobile phones is both amazing and a little scary, but nonetheless can mean big things in terms of marketing. This article is concerned with the Mobile Data Challenge by Nokia which is motivated by the belief in the value of mobile computing research for the common good. The article constantly refers to privacy rights and protecting those rights of the individuals involved and states that this is the key reason for access and usage limitations of big data.

The article outlines the basis of the The Mobile Data Challenge which provided researchers with an opportunity to analyse a relatively inexplored data set, giving them two research alternatives. First, the open track which approaches data from an exploratory perspective, allowing researchers to propose their own challenge task based on their own research interests and background.

Secondly, there was the dedicated track which set out three concrete tracks to solve. The first being semantic place prediction (studying where the user frequently visits). This data is used to follow the next track of ‘next place prediction’ where researchers predicted the destinations of the users given the current context. Thirdly the researchers inferred basic demographic groups of users based on behavioral informantion collected from the phones.

This is incredibly beneficial for marketing, as companies could use the demographic groups to pinpoint their target audience and make use of the next place prediction and frequently visited locations to establish where money would be best spent on advertising for that target audience, giving them specific locations to promote their product. For example the owner of a bar could foresee accurately the time and day which their target audience is likely to walk past their door and put things in place to entice them inside.

Laurila, Juha K., Daniel Gatica-Perez, Imad Aad, Jan Blom, Olivier Bornet, Trinh-Minh-Tri Do, Olivier Dousse, Julien Eberle, and Markus Miettinen. “The mobile data challenge: Big data for mobile computing research.” In Proceedings of the Workshop on the Nokia Mobile Data Challenge, in Conjunction with the 10th International Conference on Pervasive Computing, pp. 1-8. 2012.