Technology
Panning for Gold
By By Steve Reno March 29, 2010
As smartphones become smarter and handsets handier, businesses that seek to tap into the mobile market would benefit from more accurate data about their users. Seattle-based startup Ground Truth recognized this trend and is applying a new data collection method to find out exactly how people are using the mobile internet.
Instead of culling information from surveys of sample groups, Ground Truth, which was founded in October 2008, compiles data on millions of users by the carriers themselves. This method allows for not only a large sample group of mobile internet users (Ground Truth entered the market with a sample of 2.5 million subscribers), but also for data to be updated on a weekly basis instead of monthly or quarterly like traditional surveys.
Ground Truth does not reveal the sources of its information, and all of its data are aggregated so that it does not have access to information about individual users. In other words, Ground Truth has data on how many people visit a given site, but not who visited the site or what kinds of phones they had.
Privacy is of the utmost importance to us, Ground Truth president and CEO Sterling Wilson says.
One thing that Ground Truth is discovering from its research is that people do not surf the internet on their phones in the same way as they do on their computers. For instance, in the first week of 2010, Ground Truth found that of the 10 most visited websites, three were targeted exclusively at mobile phone users: Mocospace, FunForMobile and AirG.
Just as eBay, Amazon, Facebook and Twitter popped up seemingly out of nowhere to join the top ranks of the wired web, there is no doubt that some of the mobile web startups from today or tomorrow will be stand-alone companies in the top 10 mobile web sites of 2020, the company posted to its blog when it launched.
As new devices like Amazons Kindle and Apples iPad become more popular, having good data on mobile internet use becomes critical.
We really want to become the currency by which people measure what people do on a mobile device, Wilson says.