A San Francisco-based startup has sent out data collectors armed with just an Android phone, to harvest real-time economic data as and where it happens. From the price of onions in Indian cities to delayed infrastructure projects in rural China,Premise data is, for the first time, giving governments, investors and NGOs an accurate glimpse of what is happening on the ground.
In the Butantã branch of Extra, the Brazilian supermarket chain, in the western suburbs of São Paulo, Sandra Morais, 37, is taking photos of bags of rice.
She's not some retail Instagrammer or an obsessive foodie, but one of 25,000 data collectors that a San Francisco-based startup called premise.
The aim is to ascertain which products are available , at what price and quantities available and location available to facilitate proper planning .
Premise was founded in 2012 by an American former investment analyst, David Soloff, now 46, who realized that a large amount of developing-world economic data, on which big institutions were basing their risk and funding decisions, was significantly out of date by the time it reached their desks.
Government figures were often weeks old and sometimes manipulated. Consumer prices reflected broad trends rather than what shoppers were actually paying in the market.
A satellite imagery could give a clue as to the extent of, say, an electrification project in rural Zimbabwe, there was no way of telling which houses were actually connected to the grid.
"The problem was," he says, "that the way data in these areas was being captured was 60 or 70 years old, rooted in the years just after second world war, specifically the Marshall Plan.
Typically, a highly paid, specialist consultant would fly into the country from somewhere like London or Frankfurt to do some fact-finding on, maybe, a semi-annual basis and then, they'd write a report, which would be delivered to the folks who were running the programme.
"This is an inefficient and compromised mechanism for determining whether a programme is doing what it is supposed to".
Premise's idea is simple: put a smartphone app in the hands of people on the ground and get them to capture data, which is sent to a central server. There, the company's algorithms can spot patterns and anomalies. It can request more information and, ultimately and can publish the data in a form that can be used by Premise's clients, from commercial organisations to NGOs.
"The vast majority of our customers are not these mysterious hedge funds you read about," Soloff says. "The people using this data are folks like the World Bank, who are trying to figure out where to build roads.
They are the [Bill & Melinda] Gates Foundation, trying to map where critical financial services are available in developing Africa. Or the [United Nations] World Food Programme, which needs to understand where market imbalances are happening."
The company's real strength is to zoom in to spot specific issues on the ground, work that has already helped the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) identify food shortages before they happen.
"The FAO needs to figure out what the required amount of foodstuffs are and where they need to go to stave off famine," he says.
"When the FAO first set itself up in Rome [its HQ was transferred there in 1951], the vast amount of famine was a result of climatic failure.
Obviously, that remains an important thing, but a far more common source of resource insecurity today is human-induced: people cutting off access, interrupting supply, hoarding, making people abandon farm plots and so on.
The unpredictability of those scenarios makes them a more persistent and widespread problem than it has ever been before.
We need a much higher-resolution of what's happening at all these different locations, across a big basket of commodity foodstuffs, every day.
It's no longer enough to look at satellite photos of fields and assume all is OK." Premise's strength is the simplicity of its app and the fact that its model is almost infinitely adaptable and scalable.
The app can also monitor the prices of goods, it is able to survey costs of services such as doctors and dentists, or the availability of seats on buses.
The company says, it reserves about 20 per cent of its bandwidth for bigger things "it thinks are important".
source; wired.co.uk
No comments:
Post a Comment