Phunware CEO talks mobile technology and location
“I’m going to start by scaring you a little bit,” Alan Knitowski told the crowd at his keynote speech Oct. 29 at the Mobile Me & You conference.
He asked audience members to check whether the location services on their iPhones were on, and if so, to raise their hands.
The majority of the room did.
“This is an index of every aspect of your life,” Knitowski said. “By the way, you volunteer all this.”
A serial entrepreneur and the co-founder and CEO of Phunware, a service platform that helps brands engage and target users, Knitowski said mobile devices are the future of technology and worthy of investment.
“There’s very good uses with information technology … what I’m trying to do is be able to do one-to-one targeting with contextual awareness and location awareness.”
For brands working with Phunware that want relationships with consumers, this means access to mobile users’ devices — and thus, to information about how to give them what they want.
“We actually work with the biggest brands in the world, and we’re very invisible behind the scenes,” Knitowski said.
With its ability to help brands tap into user locations and preferences, Phunware is the fourth fastest growing software company in America, pioneering Mobile as a Service and the use of technologies like geo-proximity to understand where consumers are at— literally and figuratively.
Every brand wants to know its customers individually, Knitowski said.
And despite his warning at the beginning of the presentation, Knitowski presented a promising rather than scary view of the future for brands and consumers in an increasingly mobile culture.
“When we know who you are, where you’re at, what you like, what you don’t — all of your associations — we can actually … delight you with what you wanted,” Knitowski said.
“On a one-to-one basis.”
