Crowdsourced pinhole camera mobile signal mapper pinhole camera OpenSignal has closed a $4 million S

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Crowdsourced WiFi Network Fon Picks Up $14M Led By Qualcomm, Adds Facebook Integration
Crowdsourced pinhole camera mobile signal mapper pinhole camera OpenSignal has closed a $4 million Series A funding round, led by chipmaker Qualcomm via its investment arm, Qualcomm pinhole camera Ventures. Prior investors O Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and Passion Capital also participated in the round.
OpenSignal s premise focuses on offering independent/unbiased and likely more accurate signal maps (vs carriers self reporting their coverage) by encouraging smartphone users to download and run its signal-checking software on their devices.
CEO Brendan Gill tells TechCrunch it s now had more than nine million people download its app globally. This boils down to over 35 billion data points on the coverage and performance of wireless networks. We have data on every single mobile operator in every country pinhole camera out there. We ve also mapped over 250 million WiFi hotspots as well, he says.
Gill says the OpenSignal maps are now comprehensive enough to enable it to determine the best carrier in pretty much any metropolitan area in the world outside of some parts of the Middle East & Africa (although both of those areas are growing very fast for us) .
In the larger metropolitan pinhole camera areas e.g. New York, London, we can drill down to neighborhood level. However, there is still much to be gained by increasing our user-base as we ll be able to drill down to ever increasing levels of granularity, he adds.
OpenSignal s business model involves providing intel on the consumer experience on mobile and wireless networks to a range of paying pinhole camera customers including carriers, web companies, consultancy firms, hedge funds and telecoms regulators.
In the year since we started commercial operations we ve signed up over 20 paying pinhole camera customers around the world (spanning all five continents) including Telefonica, China Mobile and Deloitte, says Gill.
OpenSignal says it will be using the new funding for building out its team with a focus on hiring data specialists in a range of areas from individuals with expertise in data mining and locating hidden correlations, to people who can tell stories using data visualization, to data engineers who can build scalable pipelines for handling large volumes of data.
The pinhole camera future for OpenSignal is evidently going to be about expanding the type of crowdsourced data it captures fueled by the increasing numbers of sensors being embedded into mobile devices (or linked to mobile devices via Bluetooth connectivity).
The network drew on mobile sensor data from the likes of light meters and barometers, but also expanded the amount pinhole camera of data feeding its meteorology mapping after stumbling on a correlation between battery temperature and the ambient temperature around a particular device. So basically turning something that wasn t intended to be a weather sensor into a weather-related data-set by applying an algorithm that could unpick the correlation between pinhole camera battery temperature and outdoor climate.
Since WeatherSignal launched, the quantity of connected sensors in and around mobile devices has continued to proliferate meaning there is huge potential for expanding pinhole camera the types of maps that can be created in the future using a crowdsourced pinhole camera OpenSignal-esque approach.
We are only scratching pinhole camera the surface of the insight that can be drawn from wireless sensors, with OpenSignal , and from weather related sensors, pinhole camera with our sister project WeatherSignal and we won t be reducing the focus on either of those in the near future, says Gill.
There s no doubt that there will be an explosion in the rise of BLE beacons (including iBeacons) in the coming years and we have an opportunity to crowdsource a reference database of these, pinhole camera he says, pointing out that the level of location granularity supported by mapping BLE beacons offers huge potential to map dynamic context.
BLE beacons could know your context right down to something as specific as in isle 6 of the supermarket looking at the vegetarian dishes . So we consider crowdsourcing a reference database of BLE sensors pinhole camera as equivalent to crowdsourcing a reference database of context for the world, which is a very powerful opportunity, he adds.
On the air quality sensor front, Gill says that s interesting to OpenSignal because mobile makers are working on embedding these sensors into devices. The size of the data-set pinhole camera that could be built using OpenSignal s crowdsourced approach could yield applications for civic planning scenarios.
As we ve seen with other companies like Waze there is a huge opportunity to tap into the sensors that people are carrying around in their pockets to understand pinhole camera the flow and conditions of the cities we live in. We