America, mapped by the hour.
Ether Data launches 168. Every building. Every hour. 168 Foundation free across New York State.
Ether Data released 168on Google BigQuery Marketplace — a dataset that shows who's working in every U.S. building, hour by hour. 168 Foundation is free across New York State, no signup.
Most data tells you who lives somewhere — or who passed through.
168 shows who is actually there, by industry, hour by hour
— and what it will look like next.
- Forward + backward view: measure past performance, plan future outcomes.
- Forecasted benchmarks: know what "good" looks like before you launch.
- Joins with Census: who lives there + who's working there, in a single query.
- Set expected performance targets before spending.
- Plan DOOH, retail, and location strategy with real context.
- Improve MMM, attribution, and pricing with a true reference point.
No device tracking. No mobility panels.
Built from public data. Any address snaps directly to the dataset — no joins required.
Know what good looks like — before you launch.
Boston — May 11, 2026
Ether Data, a Boston-area, research-first data company, today launched 168— a new dataset that maps who's working in every building in the United States, hour by hour. It is now available on Google BigQuery Marketplace. The companion product, 168 Foundation, is free across New York State with no signup required.
Alongside 168, the company released 168 Foundation — a panel of who lives in every building in the United States, built from over 250 U.S. Census attributes. Foundation is free across New York State and snaps to the same grid as 168, allowing teams to query who lives there alongside who's working there in a single view.
Most data products that describe American places do one of two things:
- They tell you who lives there — drawn from the U.S. Census and refreshed annually.
- Or they tell you who passed through — drawn from foot-traffic vendors and sample-based device signals.
Neither tells you who is actually present in a place, by industry, hour by hour.
168 does.
“Tuesday at 2pm in Times Square is a different city than Tuesday at 11pm. Every decision tied to place — where to put a store, a billboard, a campaign — depends on knowing the difference.
Until now, the data couldn't capture it.
Now you can see it — and act on it.”Nathan Woodman, CEO, Ether Data
168 is built for teams that already think in places: out-of-home and digital-out-of-home media planners, commercial real estate, healthcare networks, and ad-tech platforms.
In pre-launch reviews, multiple measurement and analytics teams independently reached the same conclusion.
“You can't measure success without a reference point. 168 is that reference point.”Heard from measurement teams · pre-launch
The observation reflects an unusual feature of the product.
168 works in both directions of time:
- Backward, for measurement and attribution.
- Forward, for planning and pricing.
The same data shows what the audience around a billboard looked like last Tuesday at noon, and what it will look like next Tuesday at noon.
Most geographic datasets are observational; they tell you what already happened. 168 reads patterns, so it can show what's next.
“Knowing the past is for measurement.
Knowing the future is for planning.
We built 168 because the same data should serve both.”Nathan Woodman, CEO, Ether Data
168 is powered by a proprietary model that fuses more than a dozen public and government data sources into a unified, hourly view of the United States.
The dataset is organized on a national grid of small, uniform blocks. Any address — a billboard, a store, a campaign zone — snaps to the nearest block and immediately returns who's working there at any hour of the week, with no joins or lookups required.
Notably absent from the inventory: any source that tracks individual people.
Specifically:
- No device IDs.
- No mobility panels.
- No purchased tracking data.
“We wanted to see how far we could go without tracking anyone. The answer turned out to be: very far.”Nathan Woodman, CEO, Ether Data
The model has been tested against real-world signals — taxi pickups in New York, and bikeshare and subway ridership in Boston — and outperformed conventional baselines even in locations it had never seen before.
Full methodology and validation are available in a white paper upon request.
Explore a live demo at etherdata.ai.
About Ether Data. Boston-area, research-first data company. Every product is built on openly published methodology. 168 is its first product. Built without tracking — because it didn't need to.
Press contact: press@etherdata.ai · etherdata.ai · Privacy