People Mapping

Given the advances in transportation over the past decades, it would be interesting to take a large sample of the earth's population and truly map how people travel. I imagine a system where individuals (randomly sampled) from around the world each carry a GPS-enabled box that records their daily movements. These movements would be recorded as Lat-Longitude-Altitude and those could be then mapped. These movements could be shown across all of the different regions of the planet and indicated by lines. Darker lines would indicate greater numbers of people travelling those routes and so on. The map would give us a good perception of how people are really moving by region. You could also imagine creating other maps that show movement by career type, weight, age, sex and so on.

Why do this? First, it would be pretty cool to look at. Second, it would potentially be very valuable to marketers. Imagine combing a survey with this GPS data and suddenly air transport, commuter transport systems, consumer product good companies, etc. have a good way of understanding how people (and the markets they form!) move around. And thus how to market to them.