Gary Jackson: Quova has been at this mission of finding the most accurate way to locate web visitors since 2000, so we have built an extensive knowledge base and infrastructure for accomplishing that and that has occurred through a series of generations of products that has culminated with the recent announcement of what we are calling our third generation. I’d say that the primary overall benefit that we bring to websites of all kinds is the comprehensive way of knowing the location of your website visitor and also the behaviour characteristics associated with that visit.

CI: What was the recent announcement about?

Marie Alexander: Initially when we came into this market our focus was (and still is) that we wanted to determine the location of somebody coming to a website. We began to study what was termed IP geolocation and we set about determining the geographic location of roughly 1.5 billion IP addresses around the globe, and that’s all the IP addresses that are assigned and located on the internet right now. Then we began looking at other information about the IP address and the other information would be, what type of connection did they have, what was their routing time, what was the domain they were coming from, what ISP are they coming from.

Sometimes the cyberlocation of someone was just as important as understanding their physical location. Also there was some fraud work we did; what our customer base began doing at that point was to take a collection of all these different pieces of data whether it be geography or the network characteristics and look at them as somewhat of an electronic signature, how you’ve connected into the internet and so if your accessing your bank account and that electronic signature always looks the same way you’re coming from the same location you’re using the same ISP you’re coming through the same kind of connection type every time, then they can be pretty sure the next time you connect in and it all looks the same way, it’s still you. But if someone has stolen, let’s say, 600 credit cards and now they’re trying to come into that particular site and use those credit cards not only is that person’s electronic signature not going to match but it’s going to be very difficult for that person to go and find out 600 electronic signatures.

The next phase in what we announced recently was a new platform that we’re terming as Internet Location Intelligence. The name of the platform indicates that we’re broadening the solution so in those occasions where the IP address cannot give you enough information to make the decision what we will offer is the ability to supplement that data in some way.

In the case of fraud what you’re really trying to find out and determine and have indication is that if someone’s coming in from a proxy in Los Angeles and they’ve got credit cards from all people in Los Angeles and you’re able to determine that no, their connection is at least 350 milliseconds away from Los Angeles then I know I’ve got something that doesn’t look correct going on.

The other locator is through a partnership called Mexens. Their product name is Navizon and it allows you to locate a device by using the Wifi antenna in that device. But it’s very important to know that it’s a permission-based activity. Where we see this being used is when you’ve got an individual that wants you to be able to tell where they are because you have a product or service that they want and you have to be able to locate them before you allow them to have it. Relating that back to the gambling industry, with an IP address you can get down to about a 50-mile radius. What if someone is along a state or country border? There are a lot of cities that would be right there on the border, and you can’t be certain which state or country they’re in. So in that case, if you determine that you need to hone in on that then you just say, if you want to be able to place this bet I need to locate you, will you give me permission? You download it to their device and it shows you which side of the border they’re on and you can allow them to place the bet.

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