The location data of your smartphone is worth a lot of money for Wall Street
The location data of your smartphone is worth a lot of money for Wall Street
Chief Executive Elon Musk said the automaker would work around the clock to increase the production of its Model 3 sedan, which analysts of numbers in the Thasos Group decided to see.
They surrounded the 370 acres of Tesla in Fremont, California, on an online map, creating a digital corral to isolate the location signals of smart phones emanating from within. Thasos, which leases databases of billions of geographic coordinates compiled by smart phone applications, configures its computers to find the pings created in the Tesla factory, then shares them with its hedge fund clients, showing that the turn of the Night increased 30% from June to October.
Last week, many on Wall Street were surprised when Tesla revealed a rare quarterly profit, the result of the production of Model 3 that had almost doubled in three months. Shares shot up 9.1% the next day.
Thasos is at the forefront of the companies that try to help the operators to anticipate the movements of actions like the one that uses the so-called alternative data. Such suppliers could examine slag piles of mines from outer space, analyze data on credit card expenses or classify building permits. Thasos's specialty is coming out of his smartphone.
Switching to Overdrive
The location signals generated by the smartphones of Tesla workers at a facility in Fremont, California, showed that the automaker was moving overnight as it ran to meet production targets.
Estimated total hours worked, per shift.
"He's creating this information all the time, even if it's not ringing," said Greg Skibiski, founder and CEO of Thasos, 45. "It's a beacon, every person carries this beacon."
Thasos obtains data from approximately 1,000 applications, many of which need to know the location of a phone to be effective, such as those that provide weather forecasts, driving directions or the nearest ATM location. Smart phone users, intentionally or not, share their location when using such applications.
Before Thasos obtains the information, the providers delete it from personal identification information, said Skibiski. It's just longitude and latitude chains with timestamp. But with more than 100 million phones providing such coordinates, Thasos says he can paint detailed images of the ebb and flow of people and, therefore, their money.
Alex "Sandy" Pentland, a computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who helped launch Thasos, compares it to a circulatory system: "You can see this blood flow of people moving."
The usefulness of alternative data for investors is debated. Criticism goes from the argument that the samples can be full of biases and errors, to the idea that most of the data is quite useless to predict stock prices.
A worker on the assembly line of Model 3 at the Tesla factory in Fremont, California, on June 11.
Photo:
Brian Molyneaux for The Wall Street Journal
Thasos says he can count telephone buyers who leave their regular grocery stores when a new Whole Foods store opens, or evaluate drilling activity by evaluating crowds at oil patch bars. By identifying the census block where each phone spends the night, Thasos algorithms estimate how far customers travel to the incomes of shopping centers and buyers.
Thasos will not name his clients, but Mr. Skibiski says he sells data to dozens of hedge funds, some of which pay more than $ 1 million a year. The biggest investor in Thasos is Ken Nickerson, who helped turn PDT Partners into a quantitative investment mint in the interior.
This month, Thasos is ready to start offering data through the Bloomberg terminals. A measure of the mall's pedestrian traffic will be widely available; Detailed daily feeds on shopping centers owned or operated by 30 large real estate investment trusts cost extra.
Mr. Skibiski said that he had the idea of analyzing cell phone location data while sitting on a beach in Barcelona. He got lucky in a post-university job with an Israeli technology startup and withdrew his IPO actions just before the dot-com bubble burst. He looked for Mr. Pentland, whose pioneering work in geolocation at MIT had involved monitoring students as they walked the campus with GPS units attached to their hats.
Eager to meet the famous professor, Mr. Skibiski organized a presentation at a technology conference in Barcelona, at a place just before one of Mr. Pentland's protégés. It worked. The protégé heard Mr. Skibiski speak and invited him to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he and Mr. Pentland started and decided to start Sense Networks Inc.
Thasos CEO Greg Skibiski held up his iPhone for a portrait at his office in Union Square in New York City on Friday, October 26.
Photo:
John Taggart for The Wall Street Journal
In 2003, the location data of the telephone was controlled by wireless operators and compiled by mobile telephone towers. Sense Networks was building models using GPS data from taxis, and the phone companies hired it to determine which users of prepaid cell phones could have sufficient credit for the service contracted. Mr. Skibiski and Sense scientists studied the movements of prepaid phones, looking for users arriving at the airport on Monday mornings to take a business flight or dining in expensive restaurants.
In 2009, Mr. Skibiski raised $ 6 million from venture companies. One of his first moves was to fire him. Mr. Skibiski said he entered a Manhattan law office in November for the first board meeting with the company's new investors and received a letter of resignation with his name on it. Without knowing it, he had allowed investors to remove him when he signed the financing documentation.
On the way home, he picked up a copy of Businessweek and called a taxi. He cried while turning to an article about new companies that included Sense.
Finally, the company was sold to YP, a search and advertising firm. Mr. Skibiski had lost his company, but his move towards commercialization left an open door to using location data for economic analysis.
Candice Yip, quantitative researcher at Thasos, who works at the company's headquarters in Manhattan.
Photo:
John Taggart for The Wall Street Journal
The advent of smartphones meant that the location data was no longer controlled by a few operators, and it was much more accurate to come directly from a telephone than in a triangular form between mobile telephone towers. Messrs. Skibiski and Pentland started Thasos.
"We knew that customers would be hedge funds," said Skibiski. They would not want to be exposed to privacy issues. "The first thing we did was that the hedge fund lawyers would establish the company as a legal entity to approve compliance." The census data is the model, Mr. Pentland said, sufficiently detailed to have value, but not so detailed that individuals can participate. identified.
Thasos expects global telephone data to be attractive to currency traders. And it has ambitions to produce data for applications such as urban planning and disaster recovery.
In September, while Hurricane Florence was moving towards the Carolina coast, Thasos observed the evacuation zones and discovered that in well-organized census blocks, 65% of people fled, while only 39% left poor areas. Such information could inform the response to the disaster or infrastructure spending, but it could also have commercial value. "You can look at that and say: 'Gee, it could have a different insurance price,' said Mr. Pentland.
Write to Ryan Dezember in ryan.dezember@wsj.com
-Jim Oberman contributed to this article.
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