The NY Times (registration required) has a profile on Sense Networks, a company that mines millions of location data points using a tool called Macrosense.  This tool mines data using complex statistical algorithms in order to predict human movement.  The article quotes Tony Jebara, one of the co-founds of Sense who says:  “We can predict tourism, we can tell you how confident consumers are, we can tell retailers about, say, their competitors, who’s coming in from particular neighborhoods.”   The company uses data from a range of sources including data culled from taxi companies and weather data but it also uses data that it won’t disclose.  The company also gathers data by offering parallel services.  The company launched Citysense, a service offered to users of Blackberries and iPhones that learns their movements in order to recommend new places to go based on where other people with similar patterns frequent. 

• Predicting Where You’ll Go and What You’ll Like – NY Times