This blog is based on an article I read recently by (Juha et al, 2012) called “The Mobile Data Challenge: Big Data for Mobile Computing Research”

The increase in sensors attached to smart phones has led to a revolution in the data collected and created a new research domain across computing and social science. While collecting such data requires extensive effort and investment the article states that open data sharing with the wider research community is possible.

This present a massive marketing opportunity for companies who can get hold of such data sets. Some examples that the study sets out are investigating human behavior and the correlation between external events such as weather. E.g. a shopping centre could track the movement of humans on a summer day vs a winter day to influence their seasonal marketing campaigns.

As the article states, regulations for privacy and data protection play a fundamental role in in protecting all sensitive aspects of mobile data.

This is just a tiny snippet of the article so for an interesting read look up:

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.