Sprint shares demographic data with developers

Rating: Courtesy of Ground Truth and Bango

US network operator, Sprint, has just announced enhancements to its Sprint Application Developer website. Known as the Sprint Services Framework, it provides a single web 2.0 interface for developers to access APIs directly from Sprint that offers developers seamless capabilities across the majority of Sprint devices. Plus OS and development environments including the web pages. Buried away in this announcement is developer access to two very important analytic services from both Ground Truth and Bango.Ground Truth argues that its in-app analytics service for measuring usage of mobile applications has one very major benefit – access to genuine and actual demographic data.

As the company says, “These are actual demographics shared directly from the Sprint customer database – not demographics gathered from some small survey, nor projected data based on neighbourhood-level statistics. ”

The demographic metrics available to developers include: – gender, age, education, household income, and ZIP+4.

The company says that to the best of its knowledge, this is the first time that any operator anywhere has stepped forward to share such information with publishers or developers.

Currently, ground Truth offers a web based interface for Android and RIM apps with future plans to support Windows, Palm webOS and Java.

Developers can register  at www.sprintanalytics.com to begin using the service at no charge.

Sprint claims that all developers who register with it will have access to these analytics solutions and will be able to measure all of their applications across the supported platforms with one easy tool.

The other analytical offering comes from Bango where its Analytics tools provides Sprint developers with an all-round view of their mobile application business – across all mobile platforms and channels.

In real-time, Bango Analytics integrates with Bango Payment which enables developers to relate application usage to revenues generated from end user payments and ads.

These developments have been describes as an early example of how operators can be more than just a bit pipe.

Operators like Sprint possess extremely useful data and for once with the Sprint Services Framework an operator is offering to share this data with app developers.