Re: [projectvrm] SXSW is slowly moving in our direction

[Dan Lyke < >]

On Wed, 13 Mar 2013 02:42:52 -0500 (CDT)
Brian Behlendorf 
<
 >
 wrote:
> It was disheartening because I assumed the QS crowd was stuffed with
> Maker and Open Hardware types for whom locally aggregating data and
> controlling devices in a synchronized way would be second nature.

I started hanging out in some of the online QS forums back when I
started carrying a GPS tracker everywhere and was trying to figure out
to do with those voluminous tracks, and went to a Meetup or two, and I
found the same low ratio of people actually doing stuff to people
trying to figure out how to make a QS business.

I think the "Internet of Things" has similar issues, although the
hacker to bizdev ratio there is higher.

But one of the problems in several of these spaces is that the people
who already know how to use that data to have various useful
demographic characteristics. They're willing to pay for it, but they
don't know how to make the connection with the people gathering the
data, so the business model goes back to "how can we fleece the
consumer?".

Specifically: Transportation planners would love to get their hands on
GPS tracks that they can correlate to demographics and modal (ie:
automobile vs pedestrian vs transit) choice. The theory that drivers
take neither the shortest nor the quickest route is just now
(the past 2 or 3 years) gathering data to support it. A friend of mine
who does a lot of transportation industry consulting is constantly
fielding RFPs to try to gather this sort of information for one
planning study or another.

So I think one of the problems there is that on the one hand, the
hardware hackers are still trying to figure out what to do with this
data they/we're collecting, and haven't gotten much further than
OpenStreetMap. On the other hand, there's a market for this data, an to
it's big, but it isn't Facebook-IPO big. And somewhere in the middle
the stodgy transportation planners need to meet the hip with-it
Quantified Self hackers, and nobody's made that connection just yet.

Anyway, I'm not quite sure how this relates to VRM except that transit
and transportation agencies are vendors, and there's value, and
something that goes beyond Strava and the other "give us your data,
we'll pump up your ego" and distributes the more mundane data could be
really cool.

Dan