ReailtyMine CEO Garry Partington talks to Paul Maher in this week’s Greater Manchester Business Week…
As businesses increasingly look to analyse the behaviour of their customers in the digital era, data has become ‘the new oil’, according to mobile app developer Garry Partington. The founder and chief executive of Apadmi, Partington has launched a new mobile data gathering product called RealityMine, and in so doing has hit upon a potential goldmine.
The technology, which consensually monitors the behaviour of mobile phone users, has already been picked up by market research firms Ipsos and Kantar Media, among others. A further new product, which monitors behaviour through internet routers and therefore smart televisions, game consoles, PCs and tablets, has also been released.
RealityMine is expected to add £800,000 to turnover at Apadmi between April and December this year. However, with its consumer panels likely to increase from an average 6,000 people to a potential 200,000 people in 2013, revenues are expected to soar.
Partington said: “This product is solving a massive problem for businesses which want accurate data to justify and prove everything. Data has become the new oil and we are providing the tools which allow companies to have access to data they never thought they could have before. I’ve set our company a modest £2.5m turnover target next year, but considering the size of the panels which we are contemplating, that could easily be £20m and within two years £100m.
At the moment, market research firms are only scratching the surface of what they can do with RealityMine as they are just not used to getting this level of information. They are more used to receiving traffic figures, but they can now get power usage, network usage, details on the time apps were used, and how this data links with other relevant data.”
As well as collecting information, RealityMine offers full panel management for the research companies and the business is now collecting six gigabits of data each day as a result.
Created in partnership with Lumi Mobile, which is backed by Computershare founder Chris Morris, RealityMine is now live in 17 countries globally and it plans to release further products for computers and social networks.
Partington believes companies are now looking to collect and analyse consumer behaviour in this passive style, and this is creating further demand for this type of technology.
He added: “Paper surveys which gather this information have always been around 40% inaccurate as people forgot what they have done or they put down what they think you want to see. But with our passive monitoring, researchers know exactly what you really did without the inaccuracies.”
