By MIKE COURSON
Great Bend Post
The technology is already there. The next step is utilizing it. During the July 6 Great Bend City Council meeting, Great Bend Economic Development Executive Director Jason Kuilan pitched the idea of using Placer.ai to use cell phone data to determine how many people are in a given location over a period of time.
“For example, we can track how many people are downtown at a specific event,” he said. “But for the city, the purpose I really feel we should look into buying this for is, we can actually map the entire city of Great Bend over the course of an entire year and see how many people are coming into the city from outside the city, outside the county, and figure out where they’re coming from. Then, what we can do is extrapolate exactly how much, or estimate how many dollars they are spending that goes into the sales tax.”
Given his background in data analytics, and a master’s degree in data science, Kuilan said he is happy to take the lead in using the platform. But it makes sense for the city to own the data.
“However, I do think the city should be the owner because we’ve got unlimited users for one company or one organization,” Kuilan said. “Obviously, the city, with the biggest amount of employees, would make sense to have the multiple licenses.”
Kuilan explained that certain stores always know exactly how many people are inside their facility. Placer.ai estimates how many people are in the store, then validates its estimate against the real data. Placer.ai estimates it is within five percent of the actual number. The larger the target area and the longer the duration, the more accurate that data becomes. Mapping the entire city of Great Bend over the course of a year would be most accurate given the number of data points. Mapping smaller events for shorter durations would result in more fluctuation.
Kuilan feels the Great Bend Chamber of Commerce may be interested in the technology because businesses will be able to use the data, as will the Convention and Visitor’s Bureau and Great Bend Eco Devo. Kuilan noted that at a recent Fridays on Forest event and the subsequent Big Bend Bash, data showed 40 percent of visitors came from outside of Great Bend.
The goal is to determine if a sales tax, partially paid for by out-of-town visitors, is a better way to generate revenue than other potential avenues. Kuilan said users would have to opt-in to the tracking technology, but Placer.ai partners with existing apps and services already on many portable devices.