HOWZAT

Generating a “digital profile” online is not new. We leave digital fingerprints every time we surf the web on our computers. But that information is static: we do not carry our computers around everywhere we go. We do take our phones everywhere, though, and that changes everything. It creates a crucial “bridge” between the virtual world and the real world.

“We’re generating an entirely new ecosystem of data, far richer than anything before,” said Chris Lane, head of strategy at Vodafone, the mobile phone company. “It shows where people are, what they do and when they do it and can even ‘learn’ and ‘predict’ likely future behaviour.”

High-tech companies are excited about the network because by studying our real-time behaviour — “reality mining” as techie-types call it — they can create products tailored for each of us and offered to us precisely when and where they hope we will want them.

In the Spark Room, Doherty calls up a screen that will be available from next month. A mobile phone user, who has given permission for service providers to track her mobile use, walks into a shopping mall at 10am. Her calendar shows she is meeting a friend to buy shoes, then have lunch. As she enters, she receives an electronic message with a voucher offering 20% off the shoes she likes — wedges — at her favourite store and a map to the shop.

Her search history reveals that she likes sushi, so just before 12.30pm, after buying the shoes, she receives another message with a voucher for a two-for-one sushi lunch offer.

While the two women are eating their California rolls, they check their phones and find that two of their Facebook friends have just entered the mall. They instant-message them and invite them for lunch. “The girls get the shoes they want for less money, they get a cheap lunch and they get to meet their friends. Everybody wins,” claimed Doherty.

The network can create and improve almost any kind of product or service, its supporters say. Take in-car satellite navigation. TomTom, the Dutch sat nav firm, has abandoned static cameras and roadside sensors to monitor traffic movements and instead now tracks the speed at which mobile phones in cars travel — via GPS and wi-fi. This not only allows the firm to spot traffic jams when they happen, it can also predict them before they happen by calculating how many cars are likely to arrive at a pinch-point at the same time.

Microsoft is working on a similar traffic management scheme in Birmingham which also tells drivers where to find a parking space.

The network promises to transform advertising, too, producing the kind of targeted adverts seen in the futuristic Tom Cruise film Minority Report. Marketeers use signals from web-enabled devices to identify different types of consumer. By tracking where they live, where they go to work and where they go to relax, they know their patterns of behaviour and get an idea of what they earn. That makes it easier to target adverts at the people most likely to respond to them.

“We can place ads for beer on electronic billboards near bars, where we know people who drink beer go, at the time they go there and do the same with wine near wine bars at the time that wine drinkers like to go,” said Steve Ridley of Kinetic, an advertising firm.

The network is not all about business, though. Our digital footprints have social and civic uses, too. By analysing how we travel on foot, by road or on the train, town planners and transport bodies are changing the fabric of our cities.

Path Intelligence, based in Hampshire, uses phone data to help planners smooth the flow of pedestrians through railway stations, airports and shopping centres. Rather than relying on snapshot surveys, it can analyse the real-time flows of real people. The network also helps doctors and health professionals: search engines, notably Google, are already using web searches to help health authorities predict the spread of viruses such as swine flu. People are more likely to search for the symptoms of the illness on the internet before they visit their doctor, goes the logic. A sudden spike in searches for swine flu symptoms in a particular location might indicate an imminent outbreak.

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