APPS,DATA AND ECONOMIC GROWTH.

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. 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economic data, on which big institutions were basing their risk and funding decisions, was significantly out of date by the time it reached their desks The company's real strength is to zoom in to spot specific issues on the ground, work that has already helped the Food and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 company's first client, when it was still in stealth mode in 2013, was Bloomberg, which streamed Premise's food-staples indices for the US, China, India, Argentina and Brazil to analysts' screens. From then on, the company grew fast, attracting clients such as Standard Chartered bank, which uses data supplied by Premise to publish a food-price index for Nigeria and Ghana. Premise now has data-gatherers situated across 34 countries, has raised $66.5 million (£45m) in VC funding and, so far, has paid out $3 million to its contributors on the ground. The Premise app is designed to run on the often-outdated versions of the Android OS that are common in the developing world. (The company says 30 per cent of the phones the app is running on are "vintage" – older than 2012.) Each week, collectors receive a new list of items they need to record. It is up to them when they go out and complete it, though the system is designed to understand their individual work patterns and preferences, and to hand out jobs accordingly. Premise now processes about 42,000 images per day, each of which is vetted for accuracy. The app can be used to predict economic changes as seen last year when it asked its collectors in Venezuela to photograph the lengths of queues outside supermarkets, gaps on shelves and signage that indicated rationing, to see the true effect of falling oil prices on the country's food supply. The government was painting a rosier picture and it predicted the outcome of Brazil's 2014 presidential election by counting the number of posters for rival candidates on the streets of the country's cities. Source;wired.co.uk