• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, November 4, 2014

As more devices connect to the Internet, brand marketers will become consumed with trying to figure out how to use the correct data in real time. We've come to know it as the Internet of Things (IoT). SpaceCurve, a Seattle startup specializing in all types of spatial data like longitude and latitude from Twitter tweets,  will partner with AirSage, which collects anonymous data. The deal aims to help brands better understand consumer behavior in real time based on time, location, motion, sensor data, and other attributes.

Dane Coyer, SpaceCurve CEO, believes the company invented a new way to process geospatial and location data that comes from open sources like weather or census bureau, as well as first- and third-party data. How and when things occur has become just as important as clicks and conversions. "Did the weather influence the consumer to come into my store or go to a competitor's store?" he said. "The data shows the correlation with business outcomes and customer satisfaction."

Gartner predicts that by 2017, 50% of IoT solutions, typically a product combined with a service, will originate in start-ups that are less than three years old.

SpaceCurve raised $10 million in funding last summer, backed by Triage Ventures, Reed Elsevier Ventures and Divergent Ventures. It moved into a new office in late 2012, and at the time the company said it planned to triple its staff of about a dozen employees, per one report. In June the former CEO had left the company and "a number of staffers" were laid off.

It seems as if SpaceCurve's partnership with AirSage is the first since it regained some footing. Similar to the way search marketers tap online data to determine how visitors find their Web site, brands can use technology and data from the partnership to track and target consumers in physical locations prior to their arrival. Once at the location, the technology can track and identify traffic patterns that don't work well.

AirSage receives continuous signals from phones, tablets and other devices in real time. The company gets it from top-tier wireless carriers, resulting in between 50-and-250 insights daily per device. The data lets brand or event managers better evaluate a guest's experience in a store or a venue, including wait times in a line; purchase decisions related to their movement; and how they interact with or experience products, kiosks, dining, other services.

All the data goes into a common database and everything that occurs in a specific location gets tied together. The platform breaks it down by minute, hour, day, month; whatever time is meaningful to the business.

"When you look at the amount of sensor data that will be generated, and generated at machine speeds, not human speeds, how do you take the millions upon millions of data points that have location and time as components of that device and fuse it together with data being generated from multiple devices in real time?" Coyer said. "Doing fast queries on stale data really does not buy you much."