How Verizon and Other Wireless Carriers Are Mining Customer Data | MIT Technology Review

Posted on by cathywu

AirSage, an Atlanta, Georgia, a company founded in 2000, has spent much of the last decade negotiating what it says are exclusive rights to put its hardware inside the firewalls of two of the top three U.S. wireless carriers and collect, anonymize, encrypt, and analyze cellular tower signaling data in real time. Since AirSage solidified the second of these major partnerships about a year ago (it won’t specify which specific carriers it works with), it has been processing 15 billion locations a day and can account for movement of about a third of the U.S. population in some places to within less than 100 meters, says marketing vice president Andrea Moe.

As users’ mobile devices ping cellular towers in different locations, AirSage’s algorithms look for patterns in that location data—mostly to help transportation planners and traffic reports, so far. For example, the software might infer that the owners of devices that spend time in a business park from nine to five are likely at work, so a highway engineer might be able to estimate how much traffic on the local freeway exit is due to commuters.

via How Verizon and Other Wireless Carriers Are Mining Customer Data | MIT Technology Review.

I’ve met the Boston Bombers – Fides

Posted on by cathywu

In my last year of college I was getting a facial from her, and asking her about why she had originally come to the United States with her family about eight or ten years previously.  She told me that she and her husband had been lawyers and political activists in Russia. They had fled the country after “something that her husband did.” Her daughter had recently been divorced at this time, and her daughter’s ex-husband had taken their child to Russia, refusing to return him. Finally the child was returned. When my mom asked Zubeidat how they had gotten the child back, she told her that “her [Zubeidat’s] husband was crazy” and everyone knew it. When he threatened the daughter’s ex-husband’s family, they returned the child. During this facial session she started quoting conspiracy theories, telling me that she thought 9-11 was purposefully created by the American government to make America hate muslims. “It’s real,” she said, “My son knows all about it. You can read on the internet.” I have to say I felt kind of scared and vulnerable when she said this, as I am distinctly American, and was lying practically naked in her living room.

via I’ve met the Boston Bombers – Fides.

These are humans that we’re dealing with.

Bomb Details Emerge in Boston Case – NYTimes.com

Posted on by cathywu

“It’s our intention to go through every frame of every video that we have to determine exactly who was in the area,” Edward Davis, the Boston police commissioner, said at the news briefing. “This was probably one of the most well-photographed areas in the country yesterday.”

via Bomb Details Emerge in Boston Case – NYTimes.com.

Idea: Photosynth that is resilient to dynamic objects, as a crime tool.

Amazon as corporate charity: Jeff Bezos says there’s a method to the madness.

Posted on by cathywu

More fundamentally, I think long-term thinking squares the circle. Proactively delighting customers earns trust, which earns more business from those customers, even in new business arenas. Take a long-term view, and the interests of customers and shareholders align.

via Amazon as corporate charity: Jeff Bezos says there's a method to the madness..

Inspire Talk

Posted on by cathywu

A long time ago, when I was a columnist at the Las Vegas CityLife, my editor called me up one day and asked if me if I ever wanted to find out what was in the storm drains under the city. And because I have notoriously poor self-preservation skills, I grabbed a Mag-Lite and headed on down.

What I discovered was that hundreds of people live in those storm drains, beneath these neon-lit streets. Some of them are junkies or gambling addicts or winos. A lot of them are crazy, though it’s hard to tell if madness drove them into the drains or if it found them down there in the dark. Whatever the case, there are a lot of them.

And they survive down there. They pilfer materials from construction sites or the dumpsters behind Home Depot and they build themselves shelters, even tiny houses. They build shelves out of cinderblocks and two-by-fours to hold whatever possessions they’ve managed to keep for themselves. They build beds on stilts, so that when the rains come and flood the drains they don’t get washed away. They survive, and dismal and frightening and miserable as it might be, they make a space for themselves, in a filthy, dirty, spooky place that would look to most of us like the penthouse level of Hell.

That is my definition of innovation.

via Inspire Talk.

HT Minh-tue