There has been an explosion of new websites of late focused on helping people track and monitor personal information through digital media. A recent WSJ article, entitled The New Examined Life, alerted me to the scope of the phenomenon, so I thought I would spend some time this week examining a cross section of such offerings and attempt to understand their significance.
Which is, of course, enormous from a marketing standpoint. Since personal informatics services are by their very essence opt in, the range and quantity of such data, and its marketing implications, are enormous.
It would be very useful for a packaged goods company to understand the exact menstrual cycles of prospects.
It would be of tremendous value for hospitality companies to understand where, when, and why an individual travels.
Similarly, understanding the most mundane patterns of our lives, like the places we walk when headed to work, for example, has solid implications for a variety of commercial concerns.
Of course there are massive potential privacy issues in this space. Personal informatics companies will need to be at the forefront of user disclosure in order to be viable for the long haul. But if consumers are indeed interested in sharing these sorts of personal life details with the world, its easy to see why we marketers can be excited about the development.
Through some rapidfire posts I want to introduce you to 7 or so of these companies over the next two days.
So let's get my fingers typing, and your eyeballs reading, shall we?
Wait, one more piece of business. I want to make the following PowerPoint available here to you as well. It is entitled Polite, Pertinent, and Pretty, and is a discussion of personal informatics. From Matt Jones (of Dopplr) and Tom Coates of Yahoo! Brickhouse. It offers a range of really powerful insights to shed even mroe light on the topic.
So on with the show!
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