Motionloft - A New Kind of Traffic Count For Business And Real Estate

[M II A II R II K]

It’s A Good Thing That Motionloft’s Sensors Are Spying On You


April 12th, 2012

By Ariel Schwartz

Read More: http://www.fastcoexist.com/1679661/i...-spying-on-you

Website: http://www.motionloft.com

Motionloft, a San Francisco-based startup backed by Mark Cuban, wants to track your every move, whether you’re on foot or in a car. Don’t panic: The startup’s sensors, which are in the process of being installed around San Francisco, track anonymous data--and it will all be used for good, if Motionloft can help it.

- The five-inch-by-five-inch nondescript sensors need only to be attached to a window with a view of the street to unobtrusively start counting all the people and cars outside. All of the information is funneled into the cloud, where it ends up in Motionloft’s online dashboard. The startup already has sensors placed throughout San Francisco (and is in the process of installing more), so it has a relatively complete picture of traffic in the city.

- There is an infinite number of uses for Motionloft’s data, but the startup is beginning with real estate developers and businesses. A coffee shop could use this kind of information to choose a location that has lots of mid-day traffic. A restaurant could use it to decide whether to focus on breakfast, lunch, or dinner. That’s what happened with Showdogs, a restaurant in San Francisco’s Central Market neighborhood that recently started using Motionloft’s sensors.

- Motionloft is already working to make its sensors more specific; instead of just sensing cars and people, it will be able to sense bicycles, different vehicle models (i.e. SUV, sedan, etc.) and track the speed that people are walking. Mills says that the startup is also working on ways to mash up weather data with its traffic information, so people can see how weather impacts drivers and pedestrians.

- Mills assures me that privacy issues are nonexistent. "We’ve built a solution that doesn’t transmit any video, it doesn’t transmit any pictures back to us. We don’t want to be scary. We want to help people. Anybody can look at this data." Motionloft offers an enterprise subscription solution for businesses that can get data down to the address level. And this month, the startup is launching a $149 per month service that allows anyone with an Internet connection to access San Francisco’s data, broken down by neighborhood.

- While Motionloft’s bread and butter is real estate, the general public will probably have plenty of other ideas on how to use the data. Someone moving to a new city might use it to decide where they want to live based on traffic density at different times of day, city planners could use it to figure out how to deploy emergency services, or residential landlords could take the opportunity to jack up prices in popular neighborhoods (now with statistics to prove it!).

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[tech12]

This is cool, but it sucks that it costs $150 to access the data, and it also sounds like the following is one of the most likely outcomes:

residential landlords could take the opportunity to jack up prices in popular neighborhoods (now with statistics to prove it!)

Great. Like we really need even more reasons to raise housing prices in this city.