Earlier this week, Placed CEO David Shim notified me that the company’s “Insights” product would be launching today. As we wrote back in October, this is a key piece of the “big data meets local” trend to provide analytics around physical world locations.

In that respect, the best way to think about Placed Insights is comScore for the offline world. Much like comscore, Placed gets its data from an opt-in panel of mobile users. It has accelerated that effort by paying app developers to integrate opt-in location tracking to their apps.

After collecting all this data for a few years, the result has been 13 billion locations measured from about 70, 000 panelists.  As we’ve discussed, this can be valuable for retailers, brands, advertisers or app developers to measure user behavior and build strategy accordingly.

From our previous writeup:

Users of a given app can be measured to see that in the aggregate, 8% are likely to be near a McDonalds or 12% are likely to be near a Starbucks. This has marketing implications for these chains, as well as their competitors or complimentary products.

According to Shim, Placed offers this data for free, and will begin to monetize after an ecosystem is formed around its use. There are also many upsell possibilities such triangulating different data sets to discern deeper levels of understanding of user behavior.

To illustrate what Insights is capable of, today’s launch comes with a few data nuggets. Check them out below, and more to come as we follow Placed and the overall developing “location analytics” space. It will come into play in location based mobile ad targeting among other things.