Premise, a technology startup based in San Francisco, has created a mobile application that seeks to provide companies and traders with a global inflation monitor, the New York Times reported Sunday.
Quentin Hardy writes the app is designed to use big data and crowdsourcing to collect “hyperdata” from wet markets and feed the information to enterprises, who work to derive insights from them.
“Hyperdata comes to you on the spot, and you can analyze it and act on it on the spot,” said Bernt Wahl with the Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology at the University of California, Berkeley.
“It will be in regular business soon, with everyone predicting and acting the way Amazon instantaneously changes its prices around,” he added to the Times.
The Premise model works by recruiting photographers from more than two dozen emerging economies and paying them to use the app to take pictures.
Photos are sent back to the company for processing and are integrated with data on when and where they were snapped.
Hardy reports pricing data from the pictures is combined with other sources from thousands of websites, then a company builds its real-time inflation indices and price maps depending on its subscribers’ needs.