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Uber To Turn Into a Big Data Company By Selling Location Data
Presto Vivace sends news that Uber has entered into a partnership with Starwood Hotels that hooks accounts from both companies together. If you're a customer of both, you'll get a small benefit when chartering Uber rides, but the cost is that Uber will share all their data on you with Starwood. The article says,
This year, we are going to see the transformation of Uber into a big data company cut from the same cloth as Google, Facebook and Visa – using the wealth of information they know about me and you to deliver new services and generate revenue by selling this data to others. ... Uber can run the same program with airlines, restaurants, nightclubs, bars – every time you go from point A to point B in an Uber, “A”, “B” or both represent a new potential consumer of your data. ... Uber knows the hot nightclubs, best restaurants and most obviously now has as much data about traffic patterns as Waze (which coincidentally trades data with local governments). Combining Uber’s data with the very-personal data that customers are willing to give up in exchange for benefits, means that Uber can, and is, on its way to becoming a Big Data company.
Ah, IQ, the metric which people use to devise employment tests, because people with high IQs do better in employment. Go go gadget circular reasoning!
I'm not sure what depth of stupidity manages to believe that human intelligence can be reduced to a repetitive, simplistic shape-matching exercise.
(disclaimer: I apparently have an IQ of 158. But god fucking knows I'm as average as can be.)
Haha. Anyone who has been to a South East Asian country knows all about this. You get a cheap price for the taxi and then spend half the day at the driver's cousin's Gem store on Silom Road trying to convince them to take you to see the real Giant Buddha. It's funny how you add a splash of paint and some suits to a scam and everyone thinks the western world is 'advanced'.
As someone who is an SPG member and generally keeps tabs on what new promotions Starwood runs, this is anything but news. Starwood has over the past year or two, as a general strategy, struck up this kind of relationsip with a ton of companies.
- Starwood partners with Caesars Entertainment, where your SPG profile and your Total Rewards profiles can be linked. This means that loyalty shown at Caesars casinos can help you at Starwood hotels, and vice-versa
- Starwood also partners with Delta, where your SPG profile and your Skymiles profile can be linked, in a simmilar capacity - you can earn both skymiles and SPG points for Detla flights and for hotel stays.
- Now, they are doing the same with Uber... same story as above.
Obviously these companies are going to share customer data. However, if you think Starwood has the infrastructure built, capacity or talent to data mine Uber for what restaurants you go to and target hotel promotions, I think you have a bit higher expectations of them than I do. The much more immediate use of these types of partnerships is to encourage cross-brand loyalty for both companies.