Some time late last year, in the course of discussion on the positioning for AllTrack we came up with the term Personal Analytics. Personal Analytics, as we described it, is the process of using large amounts of personal data snippets to extract or infer traits about one’s personal habits, preferences and so on.

We were quite excited, but a quick google search revealed that ‘personal analytics’ was just about warming up as a topic in the US. It was good and bad! We didn’t invent the phrase, but the fact that we have a service that addresses an emerging need was good.

We dug deeper and found that most emerging solutions for personal analytics were based on the assumption that the users are heavy users of computers, gadgets and the internet. None of the solutions address the ‘last foot’ issue: how to get that important data logged? The key issue is that each piece of data by itself is not important enough to motivate you to open a browser, assuming you are in front of a machine, and if not to go to a machine and power it on, just to add a note that you had your fourth cup of coffee that evening! However, collectively such data can give you insights about your coffee drinking habits and its impact on your productivity, for example. But here is the major caveat: unless you relentlessly collect every one of those small pieces of data the aggregated insights or patterns are difficult to extract.

Here is where AllTrack’s simple use of SMS on the ever-handy mobile phone has an advantage. The barrier to data entry, to coin a new phrase, is very low. Especially in India, there are several additional factors:
First, SMS charges in India are among the lowest in the world. Second the exploding (400 million Plus?) number of phones and users in India can all use AllTrack since every phone supports sending and receiving SMS. Third, the use of SMS itself has increased exponentially in the past few years and people are increasingly comfortable using text messaging.

A recent blog, Three things to track in your life talks about personal analytics. The author advises people to track three things: expenditures, time and habits. We couldn’t have written it better! These are exactly the three broad aspects that AllTrack enables its users to track.

Just as I am about to post this, I was referred to this excellent article in the NewYork Times Magazine on the Data Driven Life. It is a long article but worth reading. Here is a snippet to give you a sense of the article (with my emphasis):

“Trackers focused on their health want to ensure that their medical practitioners don’t miss the particulars of their condition; trackers who record their mental states are often trying to find their own way to personal fulfillment amid the seductions of marketing and the errors of common opinion; fitness trackers are trying to tune their training regimes to their own body types and competitive goals, but they are also looking to understand their strengths and weaknesses, to uncover potential they didn’t know they had. Self-tracking, in this way, is not really a tool of optimization but of discovery, and if tracking regimes that we would once have thought bizarre are becoming normal, one of the most interesting effects may be to make us re-evaluate what “normal” means.”

We are happy that AllTrack, India’s first mobile Personal Analytics service, is ready just in time!

Filed under: General, Personal Analytics by manohar