Geospatial technology has come a long way and today location intelligence is a growing element in business intelligence – designed to garner quality intel which in turn, generates better decisions, writes, Gideon Rottem, CEO and co-founder, Deeyook.
In the public sector, location intelligence data helps first responders have an immediate impact on public safety in various emergency situations like a fire or an earthquake. A fireman or emergency medical technician (EMT) worker can find someone faster who is trapped because he/she knows the fastest route via the trapped person’s ultra-specific location. Local government bodies can use data collected by sensors (most often mounted on streetlights) to optimally manage waste, streetlight usage, and other utilities.
Within the retail sector, location intelligence allows retailers:
- To map customer’s purchasing behavior patterns in-store
- To market products based on consumer location, and
- To adapt more efficiently inside the storage and manage the inventory successfully
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Local Intelligence Against Human Trafficking
On a social scale, location intelligence is used to curb human trafficking. Modern slavery is a global crisis that generates $150 billion-per-year and affects 24.9 million modern slaves, but one that can be remedied by location intelligence. The technology is used to locate victims or a criminal’s human trafficking route through their personal devices’ software development kit (SDKs), getting to disrupt their path and provide more resources to help victims. By recognizing and detecting specific human trafficking terms and incidents (and analyzing unstructured data like WhatsApp messages or images), we can learn a lot not just about the routes taken, but also about the modes of commerce and behavior in this underground industry. By sharing the results, we can get better cross-sector collaboration between international organizations, like Interpol and local police stations, which will increase the chance to shut down human trafficking efforts.
A Glimpse at the Future
In an ever-evolving world, what are location intelligence’s next developments that we can expect?
Now, GPS-enabled smartphones are typically accurate to within a 4.9m (16 ft.) radius under an open sky, however, their accuracy worsens when the weather is bad or when there are buildings, bridges, and trees nearby. While in the future, things will get much more accurate, innovators in the field are now trying to achieve 10cm accuracy (4 inches).
While outdoor positioning is working at a respectable level, indoor location technology is way behind schedule. Through advances in indoor positioning, we will be able to locate people and objects indoors, ultimately using navigation apps inside of maze-like office buildings or museums in the same way apps like Waze are operating outdoors. Other innovations, like laser-guided measurement or angle measurement algorithms (different from current time-of-flight location methodology), will further advance the precision and ubiquitous of location intelligence.
Learn More: Marketers Are Swarming Over Location Data
To Wrap Up
One of the ways to drive sales, particularly for stores, is to look for inventory exposure at the product level.  Innovative POS technologies will power these stores to get their stock into the open. Meanwhile brand and product funnels will have increased accuracy tied to consumer activity, advancing toward micro-bidding between local competitors at the product level. This can even include detailed and unexpected phone push notifications, such as alerts that say, “you are in an illegal parking space.â€
There is little doubt that location intelligence will enable a technological leap in many fields, including the Internet of Things, transportation, retail, and logistics. The underlying challenge moving forward will be about weighing questions of privacy with the benefits of having the data, which is a necessity to drive humanity forward.