Big data continues to be critical to businesses and operations and the services companies with a footprint in the space are doing well because of it. Data-as-a-Service, or DaaS for short, is a booming market, as a newer portion of the worldwide public cloud services market estimated by Gartner to have grown by 18 percent year-over-year to $246.8 billion in 2017. DaaS, a cloud service for ensuring the availability of important data in an efficient manner to businesses, is growing in popularity as companies increasingly look to complicated data sets to reach their target audience in the most efficient manner.
Microcap EQ Inc. (TSX-V: EQ), albeit with a market cap still of only around $20 million, has enjoyed a steady climb over the past year or so, rising from nearly illiquid trading around 7 cents at the start of 2017 to an all-time high in December at 70 cents.
Using proprietary algorithms and technology, the Toronto-based company is an expert in location and behavior data intelligence, using that data for predictive analysis. In the simplest terms, EQ uses data (over 7 TB daily, integrated with more than 40 million points of interest and over 300,000 integrated mobile apps) that increases probability of potential purchases based upon a person’s location and typical population behavior.
On Tuesday, EQ said that it inked a one-year licensing agreement with an anonymous “Leading Western Media Agency” for its audience creation and insight reporting console, called LOCUS. The company claims that the LOCUS platform captures “the type of data that has never been captured before,” packaging macro information on the movement of populations with real-world insights into behavior. EQ CTO Dilshan Kathriarachchi says this creates a “level of understanding that is invaluable for impactful advertising.”
The unnamed company will now have access to the LOCUS audience data in a continuously updating fashion. Company names are often withheld for competitive reasons.
As of about 12:30 PM ET, shares of EQ are trading ahead by 3 cents, or 5.3%, at C$0.60 in Toronto. Since hitting the peak in December, shares have pulled back to as low as 52 cents and continue to consolidate, primarily in a range between 55-60 cents.
