Some people would do anything to avoid having their location tracked via their mobile devices. But Seattle startup Placed today introduced a free app that encourages people to let companies track their location in exchange for possible rewards.

It’s called Placed Panels, and it lets marketers create a unique panel for their company for free and recruit participants, to analyze the places they visit and better understand customer behavior.

“If your company is not leveraging location analytics, you are at a competitive disadvantage to peers in your industry,” said David Shim, Founder and CEO of Placed, in a news release. “Placed Panels enables companies to measure the places their customers go in the real world.”

The app, available both on iOS and Android devices, collects user location data and participants may be given rewards like gift cards and other incentives, depending on the chosen panel.

Placed ran a pilot in August that reached 36,000 offline mobile phone users who installed the Panels app. The table above shows the most popular restaurants by market, as an example of the type of information that Placed can give to businesses.

We wrote about Placed back in June, with Shim telling us at the time that the service allowed app developers to see where people are consuming content. Placed expanded its location analytics in August.

Placed raised $3.4 million from Madrona Venture Group and others in March.

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