| Website | sensenetworks.com |
| Category | Mobile/Wireless |
| Phone | 646 723-2324 |
| Employees | |
| Founded | 5/03 |
| Description | Mobile data pattern research |
| Total | $9M |
| Series A, 4/08 Drobny Global The Challenge Funds Passport Capital | $3M |
| Series B, 6/09 Intel Capital | $6M |
A machine-learning startup co-founded by MIT computer scientist Sandy Pentland, Sense Networks collects billions of data points about people’s locations from cell phones, taxi cabs, cameras, and GPS devices. It then analyzes the data looking for aggregate patterns about consumer behavior which it hopes to sell to financial institutions and investors.
The company’s first application is Citysense, which is a mobile app download initially for the Blackberry that shows a real-time heatmap of popular clubs and hotspots based on how many people are actually there.
Citysense is essentially a demonstration app built on top of Macrosense, the company’s main technology platform. According to the company:
“At the heart of Macrosense are powerful machine learning algorithms that process time-stamped location data and metadata streams from heterogeneous sources - GPS, WiFi positioning, cell tower triangulation, RFID and other sensors – allowing companies and investors to better understand and predict human behavior on a macro scale.”
“Macrosense transforms raw location data into intelligent data streams that drive a variety of applications and visual representations. The platform can be configured to interface with map-based programs, enterprise grade data analysis tools, or custom applications. Macrosense can push data streams to websites or mobile apps for real-time display, or act as a real-time service supporting other processes.”
| Website | citysense.com |
| Launch Date | June 9, 2008 |
Citysense is an mobile application for local nightlife discovery and social navigation, answering the question, “Where is everybody?”
Citysense shows the overall activity level of the city, top activity hotspots, and places with unexpectedly high activity, all in real-time. Then it links to Yelp and Google to show what venues are operating at those locations. Citysense is a free demonstration of the Macrosense platform.
Citysense eliminates the need to search from small handheld devices. Instead, Citysense passively “senses” the most popular places based on actual real-time activity and displays a live heat map. The application intelligently leverages the inherent wisdom of crowds without any change in existing user behavior, in order to navigate people to the hottest spots in a city. And it’s not dependent on having a critical mass of users on the system.
The application learns about where each user likes to spend time – and it processes the movements of other users with similar patterns. In its next release, Citysense will not only answer “where is everyone right now” but “where is everyone like me right now.” Four friends at dinner discussing where to go next will see four different live maps of hotspots and unexpected activity. Even if they’re having dinner in a city they’ve never visited before.
Sense Networks has built a unique back-end infrastructure that processes years of data encompassing billions of points of positioning data. Created on the Macrosense platform, Citysense leverages this historical data analysis to normalize live location data originating from tens of thousands of devices and users moving throughout a given city.
Macrosense is a real-time location data aggregator.
At the heart of Macrosense are powerful machine learning algorithms that process time-stamped location data and metadata streams from heterogeneous sources – GPS, WiFi positioning, cell tower triangulation, RFID and other sensors – and empower companies and investors to better understand and predict human behavior on a macro scale.
