There's a new kid on the block in travel and she doesn't even know that travel is watching.
It's a seamless sharing application called Gyroscope, which integrates various online platforms and personal wearable technology trackers to create a shareable profile of your daily activity.
While this certainly screams Big Brother (users have the ability to make profiles public or private), the site has already proven popular with a long waitlist and trouble even keeping the servers up under the crush of demand.
This is also, in many ways, the pinnacle of over-sharing. However, unlike Facebook, this data is true-to-life and not a constructed view of what you want others to see.
There could also be some very real applications for travel research and marketing. The app connects to geo-tagged services such as Foursquare, Twitter, Instagram, and others. The web application also connects to personal activity tracker Moves, which integrates location information into its own daily diary.
Daily activity is sorted into three main buckets: Sports, Explorer and Digital. Each allows the user to track activities related to health and both the physical and virtual worlds.
The app compiles a timeline history of all the points within a user's connected apps, as seen below, while also offering a global view (above) that also highlights popular categories within a user's life.
This information could be very useful for targeting travel promotions to specific people, and given the community's openness to sharing, it's likely that some users would welcome properly targeted messaging in the travel and hospitality space. At the very least, the platform could become a repository for those looking to target specific user profiles based on past and present publicly shared behaviors, and identifying those who might be target demographics for certain products.
It's not yet known if the founders have any intentions of monetizing the site in this manner, either through offering data filtering tools for public profiles or targeted advertising. A "PRO" subscription already exists for $7 per month, so it seems that the team is exploring different options and the privacy policy is broad enough to focus on "private data first" without closing the door to future paths. Even so, there is a trove of data and demographic signals here that would provide deep and real insight for travel markers seeking to learn about, and target, specific customer types.
Even so, there is a trove of data and demographic signals here that would provide deep and real insight for travel markers seeking to learn about, and target, specific customer types.
The sketches above were shared by co-founder Anand Sharma in an early piece on the meta-tracker by US News back in August.
The company raised $700k just last month with participation by True Ventures, so there's going to be some investor pressure to develop the idea further. This isn't a side project nor is it some sort of "data for public good" situation. It's a business, and one that offers serious promise to boot.
The question is whether or not the PRO subscriptions keep pace with the site's need for eventual profitability, and whether the users are amenable to detailed data-targeted messaging.
For now, the public profiles are sufficient to glean some insights from the community. Travel data geeks and scientists, perhaps there is a project here to map affinities within the Explorer categories! For others, a wait-and-see approach is best but don't miss out on what could shape up to be the largest data-sharing platform ever created.