• by Chuck Martin , Staff Writer, September 17, 2015

All that sensor data being generated in the Internet of Things needs a place to go.

For industrial applications, like for power utilities or building maintenance, central data command posts are being established.

That’s where companies like IBM, with its newly announced IoT division and multi-billion dollar investment, come in. Big companies are gearing up to manage big data.

But not many marketers will be tapping into that type of data collection and analysis, since much of it is geared to industrial applications.

But it’s different on the consumer side.

When companies like Under Armour and Jawbone launch data aggregation platforms to capture and make available information from wearables devices, a new source of marketing data insights emerges. More of these types of platforms will be coming.

But the data from those devices also needs a place to go and that place is the smartphone.

I was reminded of this again this week when new stats from eMarketer came out showing that the majority (70%) of mobile users in North America have a smartphone and most (60%) use it to access the Internet.

Those phones are a potential source of data, since the sensors in them can provide a wealth of information.

Added to information coming from fitness trackers and combined with customer purchase behavior data can be a very powerful combination.

And a critical way to use that information will be to derive value from it and deliver it back to the consumer, in real time.

The place that data will be used is again, you guessed it: the smartphone. It’s still the hub.