Private Companies Mining Your GPS Data

Inrix is a private corporation that has access to aggregate GPS Data from your smart phone.

The service offered you is:

"Our unique Smart Driver Network aggregates traffic-related information from millions of GPS-enabled vehicles and mobile devices, traditional road sensors and hundreds of other sources. The result is accurate real-time, historical and predictive traffic services on freeways, highways, and secondary roadways, including arterials and side streets." 

Wynne Godley, Deceased Economist Of The Future

Economic models are going to change because of the economic crisis and you need to start reading some of the future important theorists.

One such individual might be Wynne Godley, the subject of this interesting New York Times profile.

Traditional schools of economics  presume rational behavior and perfect information.

Godley disagreed.  From the article: 

"In mainstream economic models, individuals are supposed to optimize the trade-off between consuming today versus saving for the future, among other things. To do so, they must live in a remarkably predictable world. Mr. Godley did not see how such optimization is conceivable. There are simply too many unknowns, he theorized. Instead, Mr. Godley built his economic model around the idea that sectors — households, production firms, banks, the government — largely follow rules of thumb."

List of our Godley books here.

Average Tourist in Texas

MRI+ has some data on the average tourist in Texas characteristics.

See income, age, viewing habits, education, and so on.

After getting to MRI+ and hitting Mediamark Reporter (upper right hand screen):

1. Search Fall 2012 Product
2. Choose Travel
3. Scroll down to Domestic Travel - States Visited
4. Look In the Second Box Marked Target and Select Texas

Ad$pender and Ad$ummary Tutorial

Tutorial for both Adspender and AdSummary. The tutorial starts out with the previous webpage, but clicking on Research Databases (now slightly off center right) will take you to the same place.

Research ad budgets and media deployment for brands, industries and more!