NOS SPGS, Portugal’s biggest communications and entertainment group, offers leading-edge fixed and mobile phone, television, internet, voice and data solutions for all markets. Its next big idea: use Big Data technologies to securely monetize millions of cell tower pings it gets from roaming phone users, resulting in a new free Tourist Information Portal that offers indicators to business owners and municipalities across the whole country.
Formed by the 2014 merger of two of the biggest communications companies in Portugal, ZON and Optimus, NOS is a big part of the Portuguese digital landscape. The company currently has 4.7m mobile, 1.6m TV, 1.8m landline and 1.3m broadband subscribers, and is continually searching for new markets to enter. And it seems to have found a very promising one – via something that has traditionally been a notoriously difficult thing for telcos, the monetization of mobile phone data.
This has come in the form of a new national data service it is sharing for free with a range of public sector and business partners – all delivered via a new secure national cloud portal. The service offers unique real-time, highly-detailed analyses across national and regional hospitality and tourism metrics, from the average number of nights visitors are staying to which towns are seeing low amounts of lunch bookings.
