Have you ever wonder that your GPS (Global Positioning System) mobile device will become one of the tools that is able to predict crowd movement and eventually businessman can go through the collected data before helping them to decide the best location to open up the new store in one day? Sense Networks, a software based company located in New York has just unveiled a new tool that can help to achieve this. Named as Macrosense, it involves a sophisticated analytical algorithm that can predict and recommend the most strategic location based on collected positioning data from time to time. Not only that, it can even give hints of the potential competitors surrounding it and and from where they are originated from.

There was a paper being published recently summarizing 100,000 data collected from GPS devices that indicated most of the people follow very predictable routines. This is again giving much confidence to analyst to deploy the tool more widely in short future. Obviously, this requires a lot of mobile service subscribers’ participations and some may raise the privacy concern of being tracked privately. To compensate this, Sense Network has also released another service called Citysense that can cross share back what the interesting destination most people are heading to in particular time.

Once the GPS usage become common, we should foresee more usage model to be available besides this one. Also with the technology convergence of integrating GPS capability into cellular device that hop on base station, service provider may even able to track down particular mobile phone (without GPS) subscribers at any time by mapping GPS and base station cell information.