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This was apparently a plot point in Billions. There's market opportunity here. Off the top of my head: 1) Drone photos instead of satellite photos to get at t
by pmarreck 7y ago
This was apparently a plot point in Billions.
There's market opportunity here. Off the top of my head:
1) Drone photos instead of satellite photos to get at the data cheaper
2) ML counting of cars
3) Some way to legally sense the number of cellphones within a given radius (can possibly be combined with a drone)
4) Simply aiming a network cam at the entrance/exit from across the street and counting the number of people that enter and exit via ML
All of these could get you at public data that highly correlates with retail sales
- deepnotderp 7y agoSo all of that already exists and is already widely used. I'm a bit confused as to why this is news considering that this has been going on for quite some time.
- pmarreck 7y agoMaybe because I'm a pure-software back-end guy who has no idea what the hell institutional investors do in the hardware space to make their targets, because that's not remotely my wheelhouse? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- jrochkind1 7y agoWhy would drones be cheaper than satellite photos? If they were, wouldn't the hedge funds already be doing that instead? They clearly seem not to me. The issue, if there is one, is that it is not cheap to get this data on a large enough scale to be useful. I suppose it's possible a sampling of just a few parking lots would be representative enough to be useful? In which case you don't need drones, you can just go to the parking lots. Which is apparently what Sam Walton did? I dunno. If that were good enough, again I'm not sure why the hedge funds would be paying for sattelite photos instead.
- csteubs 7y agoYou're correct that drones are more expensive than satellite imagery at scale--I'm currently working on a startup in this space that cuts the cost of imaging by between 100x and 10,000x depending on the target location.