Nils Haack / Opticalvalve.com

Mobile Phones and behavioural Patterns

Article Tags: Mobile, Phone, Pattern, Movement, Levi flight,

A team around Dr Marta Gonzales of Northeastern University, Boston US examined the movement pattern of nore than 100,000 mobile phone users in an attempt to depicture a comprehensive view on the human movements.

The implications a very interesting. If you can forecast the spread of deseases, you could probably also forecast the success of marketing activities. Imagine you apply this to web technologies. Analyse user behaviour by anonymously examining the pattern behind and place it into a grid of them. Calculate seeding points and maximize efficiency (and thus your return on investment).

Indeed, a very rough and scetchy idea. And probably still far in the future. Hach... I need to get my fingers on a copy.

The results showed that most people's movements follow a precise mathematical relationship - known as a power law.

"That was the first surprise," he told BBC News.

The second surprise, he said, was that the patterns of people's movements, over short and long distances, were very similar: people tend to return to the same few places over and over again.
Source: Extract from article by BBC - follow link below for article

So I guess, with enough mathematical skills it should be possible to develope algorithms to predict marketing success or to sustainably improve marketing efficiency in terms of higher conversion rates.