In the past 2 years, we have seen some applications emerging with ideas and concepts coming from Business Intelligence but for individuals. They are applications which provide analytical functions about some specific area of individual’s life, as personal finance analysis or more recently personal fitness tracking. I am stunned to see this business behavior, which consists in quantifying every possible thing, spreading to the individual. (With the exception that companies own their own data, not the individuals tracking their expenses on a remote server, but this is another story).
Take the case of fitbit. This is an example of data not only targeted to, but also about the individual. To my mind this initiative has an interesting potential, not really for the user (this is my personal view, one might feel differently), but for the people who will have access to the statistics of the thousands of users, provided thousands of users… of course. But the fitbit team can use the data to perform unprecedented studies with sociological, health, commercial purposes, taking advantage from the data taken right from the human body.
If these companies make their way and conquer enough users, they have the potential to be a real blast. After all, google is making money while people are writing emails, why fitbit shouldn’t make money while people sleep? Like, hum, this group of people hasn’t slept more than 4 hours in the past 4 days and they live in California and are in their 20 sthing, let’s try and sell them some energizing beverage, and this other group is over 70, let’s entice them to invest in sleeping pills.
These examples clearly show a move of BI technologies and practices towards individuals both as a source of data and as a target. Are we witnessing the birth of Personal Intelligence?
