"Influence"...what does it do?

[OutlawDr]

Last night I was watching the Totalbuscuit E3 videos again. Some random guy was looking at the map, but something caught my eye. For each territory section, there was something called "influence" along with a pie chart showing a percentage for each empire. Here are some pics
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/6636384/PS2/influence1.png
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/6636384/PS2/influence2.png

I was planning to write up a huge ass thread about an idea to integrate territorial control of the map and resources on the map to a more persistent metagame. I was going to call it "influence", but then I saw this. At first I thought I'll need to change the name, but when I tried to figure out what influence does, I couldn't come up with anything solid.

So does anyone know what influence does exactly? I couldn't find any info on it through forums search or wiki. Maybe Im searching for the wrong things. Someone should know.
It doesn't correspond to who owns the territory, since Vanu has control of one with a clear TR majority in the influence pie chart. Its doesn't represent ownership of surrounding territories. And it doesn't correspond to current ticket count for base ownership. The Zurvan area was even 33% split, but current ticket count at the time of the screenshot was no where near that.