Behavio

Behavio emerged as a spin-off from the MIT Media Lab, founded in June 2012 by Nadav Aharony, Cody Sumter, and Alan Gardner. The founders' backgrounds are deeply rooted in the intersection of technology and human behavior. Nadav Aharony, who served as CEO, earned his PhD from the MIT Media Lab's Human Dynamics group, where his research focused on using mobile phones as social and behavioral sensors. Cody Sumter received his Master's from the MIT Media Lab and MIT's Technology Policy Program, with research centered on leveraging cellphones as a sensor platform to study social dynamics. Alan Gardner, the CTO, had a background in physics from MIT and experience in enterprise search applications and mobile development.

The company's core technology stemmed from the Funf project, an open-source mobile sensing framework also originating from the MIT Media Lab. Funf was designed as an extensible framework for Android devices to collect, upload, and configure a wide range of data from a phone's sensors, such as GPS and accelerometer, to understand user behavior and context. Behavio's business was centered on providing this software and related services to developers, enabling them to create smart, context-aware applications. The platform could gather vast amounts of data about an individual's location and activities to predict future actions and patterns of behavior. The startup received a notable award of $335,000 from the Knight Foundation's News Challenge in 2012 to support its mission.

Behavio's journey as an independent entity was brief but impactful. In April 2013, less than a year after its founding, the company was acquired by Google for an undisclosed sum. The acquisition was seen as a strategic move for Google, likely to integrate Behavio's talent and technology into projects like Google Now and Google Glass to deliver more personalized user experiences. Following the acquisition, the Behavio team joined Google, and while their proprietary closed alpha project was discontinued, they stated their intention to continue maintaining the open-source Funf framework in their personal time.

Keywords: mobile sensing, behavioral analytics, context-aware computing, human dynamics, MIT Media Lab, Funf framework, sensor data, Android development, mobile data collection, pattern recognition, Google acquisition, Nadav Aharony, Cody Sumter, Alan Gardner, behavioral prediction, smartphone sensors, user context, mobile services, data processing framework, social dynamics research