I had a theory that the way to solve this was a location intelligence data union which sold safely anonymised aggregates and shared the profits, while also litigating on behalf of members under available legislation to stop other people using their data.
Alas, I was stymied by not having any cash to work on it, and the unit economics were not very VC friendly (at least I assume that’s one of the reasons why I didn’t get any traction from VCs).
A new spin on my slow baking location intelligence data union (https://wherelabs.info).
This week I’m thinking about whether it makes sense to provide a location history ‘vault’, designed to let users expose their location history to LLM’s as context.
This week I’m thinking about whether it makes sense to provide a location history ‘vault’, designed to let users expose their location history to LLM’s as context.
Still slowly working away on my location intelligence data union..
I’ve spent a while understanding what sort of market would make it viable. I think it does actually work if you can square: 10K participants per major metro area, revenue of about 2.9M per metro area (so say, 5K monthly recurring with about 50 customers).
At that point you could pay data union participants about $5 a week to share their location data with you.
From talking to some previous data union folks, the major challenges are paying out (my target is much higher than any union managed), and people dropping out over time.
My bet is that these are both solvable things by selling data products rather than just bundles of data, and the data source being very passive.
I’m also interested in the idea that such a union should act more like a union than previous efforts in this space, by actively defending members’ data from brokers.
I’ve been working more on the unit economics of my data union/trust idea (https://wherelabs.info/).
What I’m trying to understand is whether it is viable to pay people ~$5 per week for sharing their location data and demographics based on a 90% share of revenue from sales of data products built on that data. (But without ever selling or exposing individual level data).
Flowminder is a pioneering, internationally operating non-profit organisation that supports disaster relief and development efforts through several products including the analysis of data gained from mobile phones and household surveys in privacy and security preserving manners.
We are now looking for an Infrastructure Engineer with excellent communication skills to facilitate and (depending on experience) drive and lead the expansion of our small but worldwide infrastructure and product installations in cooperation with key technology partners.
We use terraform, docker, linux, python, Postgres, airflow, GCP and anything else that gets the job done. Our infrastructure sits in mobile phone operators' data centres in interesting places around the world, and we use it to help people.
We value autonomy, a drive to make stuff better, and being curious.
Alas, I was stymied by not having any cash to work on it, and the unit economics were not very VC friendly (at least I assume that’s one of the reasons why I didn’t get any traction from VCs).