Evolving Location Measurement Industry
by jason burby

As more and more brands look to better communicate with their audience and target messaging based on location, a few questions keep coming up. How accurate can I be in understanding where people are? How can I understand what people are doing in those different locations?

These are all good questions, and as marketers are starting to see, location data is very noisy. Whether it is Google Maps showing you in the wrong location, geo-tagging information tied to a photo being someplace you've never been, or when you try to check in to Foursquare at your favorite restaurant and it's the fifth place on the list of options to check in.

In my last column I interviewed Curt Hecht from The Weather Channel about ways marketers can and should be leveraging weather data to understand and target their messaging. For this column, I wanted to get a bit deeper into the data that marketers can collect and understand based on specific locations. So I reached out to David Shim, founder and CEO of location analytics firm Placed, to learn more about what they are seeing from their clients and in the industry overall as well as to share general insight into the quickly evolving location measurement industry. The following are some of the topics that we discussed that I thought would be interesting to share.

Jason Burby: The amount of data available from the use of smartphones is amazing from what people are looking at to where they are physically. When talking about location, how accurate can you get and how do you overcome location-based problems in terms of accuracy that we all experience every day?

David Shim: In early experiments we found that 90 percent+ of the time assigning the closest place to a latitude and longitude resulted in an incorrect match. This level of noise impacts a marketer's ability to effectively leverage location insights into mobile ad targeting decisions. On the flip side for a publisher the ability to target based on a mobile device's location is generally limited to 100 meters, the length of a football field.

JB: So how do you overcome that? One-hundred meters can mean very different things in terms of activities or interests.

DS: It takes more than a single latitude and longitude to determine a place. We convert that noise into signal with two distinct approaches, the first around cleaning up location data, and the second focused around contextualizing the places around a location.

To more accurately determine location, Placed looks at a series of features that include latitude and longitudes, location source, accelerometer, gyroscope, compass, etc. By treating location as more than a single value, we are able to cluster sets of data points to infer a more accurate location. This location is then contextualized to a set of nearby places, which are determined by a set of features including proximity, popularity, and category.

The end result is the connection of the digital and physical world, where instead of cookies you now have smartphones, and instead of page views you have places visited in the real world. This level of context not only provides insight into where consumers are consuming your content, but also why.

Details Here

first published week of:   11/05/2012

Experts find way to crack default WPA2 passwords of Belkin routers

Security researchers claim that the default WPA2 passwords used by many Belkin routers can be easily guessed by an attacker who knows the device's WAN MAC address. A number of Belkin wireless routers are shipped with a default WPA2 password to protect network connections. The apparently random passwords are printed on a label on the bottom of the router. Although this approach should in theory be more secure, because the password is likely stronger than what many users would set themselves, it turns out that the random passphrases are not so random.

The researchers determined that the password is based on the device's WAN MAC address, and since this information is not so difficult to obtain, a remote attacker could easily hack into a targeted network if the default configuration is used. The default password is made of 8 characters which can be determined by replacing each hex-digit of the WAN MAC address with another value from a static substitution table. Several device models are affected, including Belkin N450 Model F9K1105V2 and Belkin Surf N150 Model F7D1301v1.

Details Here

first published week of:   12/03/2012

Factual's Gil Elbaz Wants to Gather the Data Universe

AT 7 years old, Gilad Elbaz wrote, “I want to be a rich mathematician and very smart.” That, he figured, would help him “discover things like time machines, robots and machines that can answer any question.”

In the 34 years since, Mr. Elbaz has accomplished big chunks of these goals. He has built Web-traversing software robots and answered some very big questions for Google, along the way becoming a millionaire several hundred times over.

His time machine plans, however, have been ditched for something he finds more important: trying to identify every fact in the world, and to hold them all in a company he calls Factual.

“The world is one big data problem,” Mr. Elbaz says from his headquarters, a quiet office 14 floors above the Los Angeles Country Club. He is a slim, soft–spoken man who weaves in his chair when an idea excites him. “What if you could spot any error, as soon as you wrote it? Factual is definitely a new thing that will change business, and a valuable new tool for computing.”

n the booming world of Big Data, where once-unimaginably huge amounts of information are scoured for world changing discoveries, Mr. Elbaz may be the most influential inventor and investor. Besides Factual, he has interests in 30 start–ups, including an incubator in San Francisco dedicated to Big Data. Factual’s headquarters, in a high–rise on the Avenue of the Stars, hosts seminars for a data community he hopes to foster in the Los Angeles area.

Details Here

first published week of:   04/09/2012

FBI's hotel Wi-Fi warning: Don't talk to strange pop-ups
by William Jackson

The FBI, through the Internet Crime Complaint Center, has issued a warning that “malicious actors are targeting travelers abroad through pop–up windows while establishing an Internet connection in their hotel rooms.”

This is hardly earth–shaking news, but it is a reminder that the Internet can be a rough neighborhood and whenever you leave home it probably is a good idea to remember childhood warnings about talking to strangers.

The increasing power and functionality of mobile devices have accustomed road warriors and even casual users to the convenience of anywhere computing. Painful experience has demonstrated time and again that enterprise networks are rarely adequately secured, but once you step outside the perimeter the risks are likely to be even greater.

Details Here

first published week of:   05/14/2012

FCC chairman lays out plans for more spectrum, lays into AT&T
Genachowski took jabs at AT&T over its failed T–Mobile buyout while listing steps to free up more frequencies

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski outlined several agency initiatives to open up more spectrum for mobile services, as well as improve spectrum efficiency, in a keynote address at CTIA Wireless on Tuesday.

The moves, some new and some already announced, are part of a scheme launched in 2009 under the National Broadband Plan to make 500MHz more spectrum available for mobile over 10 years.

“We have to recover new spectrum, and we have to pursue all the other tools and policies at our disposal,” Genachowski said. Other techniques for better using spectrum could include small cells, smart antennas and “refarming” of frequencies used for older services into mobile broadband, he said.

Before launching into what the FCC is doing to ease the spectrum shortage, Genachowski took a few jabs at AT&T over its aborted acquisition of T–Mobile USA, which was announced on the eve of last year’s CTIA show. AT&T abandoned that plan late last year after the FCC and Department of Justice blocked it.

AT&T had argued it needed to buy T–Mobile to get enough spectrum to build out its national LTE network, and because the mobile business demands larger carriers with economies of scale to give subscribers what they want.

Details Here

first published week of:   05/07/2012

FCC Dishes on Location Based Services in New Report

The Federal Communications Commission is out with a report on location–based services that outlines government and industry efforts to address the privacy issues surrounding those very services.

The FCC declined to adopt any regulations or best practices, but stated it would “continue to monitor industry compliance with applicable statutory requirements and evolving industry best practices.”

According to details outlined in the report, the FCC has identified key privacy issues implicated by location–based services. Such issues include:

Notice and transparency. After noting the importance of companies informing users of what the company is doing with collected LBS information, the FCC recognized various industry efforts by CTIA, the Mobile Marketing Association, the Direct Marketing Association, and private companies to provide users with notice of how location–based service information is used. However, the FCC cited numerous reports that concluded many apps lacked basic privacy policies.

Meaningful consumer choice. Consumers should have an opportunity to tell a company what it can and cannot do with their information. The FCC noted that most choice is provided as “opt–in,” i.e. the user must consent before the information is used, but that challenges arise between real–time meaningful choice and user experience. Industry standards, such as CTIA, are identified by the FCC as providing guidance on consumer choice.

Details Here

first published week of:   06/04/2012

Volume 31

-->