Bloomberg BMAP

August 23, 2010 · Posted in Companies, Conferences 

I was looking through the list of folks who are attending this years Location Business Summitnext month (Sept 14-15) and noticed that Bloomberg has a speaker on the agenda from their energy and commodities group…  not your usual West Coast Loopt/Brightkite/Whrll outfit.  So I wanted to see what that was all about.

For those that didn’t make it to last years’ inaugural conference, then named Metaplaces, I highly recommend it.  It’s the biggest concentration of like minded business folks that you’re likely to come across… and while last year had a lot of focus on monetizing the mobile social networks,  this years agenda covers a lot of ground spanning the spectrum from augmented reality to well Bloomberg and containers of oil floating across the ocean.

So the LBX Journal has a great Q&A with Andre Parris, global business manager at Bloomberg behind the Bloomberg BMAP application and he is going to present a case study about BMAP at the conference.  I also had a quick run first hand on it on my neighborhood Bloomberg Terminal, and I must say that it was pretty cool.

For those not all that familiar with Bloomberg terminals, they’re specialized machines used to tap into vast reservoirs of highly specialized data used primarily by the financial services industry… over ¼ million machines are in use and folks, mostly corporations,  pay a hefty price for the depth and super high quality provided by the service. It’s not just the access to information, but also the speed and ease at which a user can get at data and the tools there to help them to ‘interrogate and analyze the data’.

So in the world of oil and energy and gas, factors related to the production and movement of physical products is quite important… according to the LBX Journal articlethe Energy and Commodities Group is the only physical business at Bloomberg, and physical things demand maps according to Mr. Parris. So  the BMAPs initiative was developed to help add a new and powerful dimension to the interrogation of all that industry data, that was previously  there, but just more difficult to digest and analyze without the visualization provided by a powerful mapping platform.

For map nerds the first thing you notice about BMAP is how fast the map photo imagery renders and how fast and smooth the pan and zoom function… it feels like something you expect Jack Bauer to be swishing around on a screen in front of him at CIA… err CTU headquarters… except that it relies on good old fashioned arrow keys and a mouse.  In fact it feels a bit weird using old school DOS like prompts to work on a Bloomberg terminal, but I am sure that research shows that it takes .0234 seconds to get data by striking a button, versus .03465 seconds for aligning a mouse… and I suspect that is all that really matters.

For finance nerds well the first thing you notice is that you can see a lot of really powerful information pretty easily. Where is that $25 million worth of crude that was supposed to be delivered to LOOP last week? Clickity, clack, clack… ah there it is third in line to get through the Panama Canal. What about that tropical depression in the Caribbean? Clickity clack clack, ah good, just a 12.28% chance that the projected path will cross with the ship.  Now who else is headed to dock there in the next five days? Clickity clack clack. Model, model, model . Trade, trade, trade and voila! Fifteen minutes to get to Scores before Misty goes off the clock!

For Bloomberg customers an information advantage is everything… having access to the data is not enough, its gotta be fast and as easy to digest as it is to slice and dice… oh yeah, and for what you’re paying for the machine… it should look good too.  BMAP does all of the above pretty damn well.

But the presentation and tools surrounding the data are only as good as the data itself… and particularly when it came to tracking ships I was a little surprised at both what seemed like a dearth of oil ships floating around as well as a the lack of freshness of the locate signals… with over half on one screen having been without a location fix in the past 24 hrs…. potentially either a designed security measure or  an opportunity for someone in the asset tracking business to start chatting it up with Mr Parris at the conference!

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Comments

  • http://twitter.com/millerwright Miller Wright

    I attended this conference this week.It drew a crowd of about 100 executives from the LBS ecosystem including a great cast of speakers (see the list at http://www.thewherebusiness.com/locationbusinesssummitusa/speakers.shtml)

    The focus seemed to be on network-based LBS. Carriers are in the game for sure! Rip Gerber, CEO of network-centric location enabler, LOC-AID Technologies, had a very interesting take on location and tracking. His messages were: LIFE, DEATH and the FUTURE. Network-based location info is breathing new life into LBS, location-based social networking companies will die and eventually evolve into just a handful, and the future is about predicting where people and devices are going. Not sure if I agree with it all but the guy is definitely an interesting speaker.

    I think one word all in the conference agreed on was the word “monetization”. Network-based LBS is going to explode and enterprises that figure out how to capitalize on this emerging trend are going to see huge profits. All in all — very focused and lively conversations which we will most likely see repeated over the next year.

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