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Our Journey - Why We Built Telcofy

· 4 min read
David Crompton
David Crompton
Co-Founder, Chief Operating Officer, and Data Scientist

Human mobility patterns hold the key to building better cities, managing crises, and understanding how societies function. Yet the field of mobility science - decades of brilliant academic research - remains locked away from those who could use it to improve lives.

We founded Telcofy to bridge that gap.

The Untapped Potential of Mobility Science​

For decades, researchers have developed sophisticated methods to understand human movement: how people navigate cities, where communities form, how diseases spread, and how to respond to emergencies. This isn't just data - it's the blueprint for how societies organize themselves.

But there's a problem. The telecommunications companies that hold this mobility data are stuck reinventing basic algorithms instead of applying this science. They build proprietary stay-point detection when peer-reviewed solutions exist. They create custom routing engines when the research community has already solved these elegantly.

Meanwhile, urban planners, public health officials, and emergency responders - the people who could use these insights to save lives and build better communities - can't access them.

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants​

We founded Telcofy on a different philosophy: honor the science, democratize the insights.

Instead of competing with decades of academic research, we embrace it. The real innovation isn't in owning algorithms - it's in making human mobility science accessible to those working to improve society.

Understanding What Really Matters​

Take emergency response. During a crisis, responders don't need individual locations - they need to understand crowd dynamics. How many people are in the affected area? Which districts are overcrowded? Where are evacuation bottlenecks forming? Our approach ensures we can answer these questions with high confidence while never tracking individuals. We see the forest, not the trees - and that's exactly what saves lives.

Or consider urban planning. Understanding that 10,000 people reliably commute between two districts matters more than tracking individual routes. These aggregate patterns - completely anonymous yet highly accurate - shape better cities.

Preserving Truth in Data​

Every assumption we make - like "home is where you are before 9am" - risks replacing real human behavior with our preconceptions. A city where everyone works 9-to-5 looks very different from one with shift workers, students, and gig economy participants.

Our approach: preserve the genuine patterns in human movement while being transparent about necessary assumptions. The signal in the data - how people actually move and live - must never be drowned out by our assumptions about how we think they should behave.

Building Bridges, Not Walls​

The mobility science community has given us powerful tools:

  • Population flow models that help predict disease spread patterns - without tracking any individual
  • Aggregate urban flow analysis that could eliminate traffic congestion
  • Crowd density models that help coordinate safe evacuations
  • Community movement patterns that inform better public services

These aren't trade secrets to be hoarded. They're scientific contributions meant to benefit humanity. And privacy isn't an afterthought - it's fundamental to making these tools ethically usable.

Why This Matters Now​

Climate change, urbanization, and public health challenges demand that we understand human mobility better than ever. Cities need to become more efficient. Emergency services need to respond faster. Public health systems need to track and prevent disease spread.

The science exists. The data exists. What's been missing is the bridge between them.

Our Vision​

Telcofy isn't just another data platform. It's a commitment to ensuring that human mobility science serves humanity - not just shareholders.

We believe that when a researcher develops a new method for understanding crowd flows, city planners should be able to use it. When epidemiologists create population movement models, public health officials should have access to them. When the UN needs to understand population displacement for humanitarian response, that data should be available - aggregated, accurate, and with privacy absolutely guaranteed.

That's why we built Telcofy. And that's just the beginning.

Interested in learning more about our approach to telco data analytics? Contact us or check out our GitHub.