January 2016 Summaries

Crowdx, a telecommunications analytics firm, partnered with CartoDB to help improve customer-related issues faced by many telecommunications agencies. The partnership enabled the creation of a dashboard that analyzes millions of data points, providing better solutions for these agencies. This collaboration aimed to address challenges such as aggregating large quantities of data and providing up-to-date tools for comprehensive analysis. By leveraging CartoDB's capabilities, Crowdx was able to help alleviate customer problems in the telecommunications industry.

CartoDB is participating in the Big Data Innovation - Las Vegas Summit from January 28-29, where they will demonstrate the power of location intelligence for big data and showcase their platform. CartoDB's Santiago Giraldo Anduaga is the official chairperson and will have a talk introducing the company and demoing its platform. The summit explores various topics related to data analytics, science, algorithms, machine learning, big data technologies, security, and cloud-based data storage. Sebastien Burgess will also be attending one-on-one meetings with top companies in the data analytics industry.

CartoDB is excited about the upcoming FOSS4G-NA conference, which will be held in Raleigh North Carolina from May 2-5 and features thousands of participants and hundreds of companies. CartoDB has proposed several sessions for the conference, including talks on building dynamic maps, machine learning on geospatial datasets, and using open source GIS to analyze government data. The company is relying on community voting to select which sessions will be featured at the event, with voting remaining open until February 8th, 2016. CartoDB hopes that their proposed sessions will be well-received by participants and looks forward to seeing them at the conference.

The Metropolitan Transit Authority's (MTA) proposed repair of the Canarsie Tunnel, which connects Manhattan and Brooklyn under the East River via the L train, will have significant consequences for L train riders. Using location intelligence data, it has been determined that approximately 114,067 people use the L to commute to work in Manhattan. The closure of the L train could disrupt this relationship between travel time and the proportion of people who work in Manhattan. In Brooklyn, areas with high or low rates of poverty status are close to the L train, indicating potential targets for outreach and alternative transportation services if the L were to close for an extended period. A shuttle bus service from Williamsburg to Manhattan could take up to 20 minutes, but would still be the better option for many passengers over backtracking to other subway lines.

Properati, a property search portal in Latin America, aims to enhance the experience of buying, selling, and renting properties by utilizing location intelligence through CartoDB. The company has created visualizations to analyze property values in San Pablo, Brazil, and to show properties close to bike paths in Curitiba, highlighting the importance of urban planning and commuting trends. Properati's platform provides users with valuable data insights, such as prices per square meter, type of property, proximity to green spaces, and public transport, allowing buyers to make informed decisions. The company's goal is to assist clients by providing market data and interpretation services, ultimately enabling them to better understand their customers' needs. Properati's open data portal and CartoDB gallery offer inspiration for others to apply location intelligence in various sectors.

The post discusses how to perform bulk nearest neighbor queries using CartoDB, a geographic information system (GIS) platform. To achieve this, the author uses a lateral join, which allows for iterating a PostGIS ordering operation once for each input row. The query calculates the distance between each parcel and its nearest fire hydrant by performing a geography type calculation on the spheroid. The resulting map is colored according to the distance, providing an attractive visualization of parcels by their proximity to fire hydrants. However, the author notes that this approach may not be suitable for large datasets due to performance limitations.

Manage your Organization More Efficiently Organization owners are now able to manage users in their organization with our new Enterprise User Management API, which enables administrators to create new users, delete existing ones, and update users' quota programmatically. This new API allows for dynamic user management, perfect for integrations with clients having atypical authentication systems or on-premises users who need to create applications on top of CartoDB. The API is available in both SAAS and on-premises installations, offering advanced auth integrations like LDAP for on-premises installations. With this feature, organizations can efficiently manage their user base using scripts that grab CSV file information and send it to the API, making it easier to onboard new employees and update existing ones in no time.

The NYPD released detailed crime data about "seven major felonies" in NYC for the first 3 quarters of 2015, but the point locations have been adjusted to mid-block or nearest intersection to prevent exact location determination. This results in many rows with the same point coordinates, causing an overlapping points problem. To address this issue, various visualization techniques can be used, including heatmaps, clustering, and spidering, which can help obscure or re-represent the data in a more usable way. A SQL hack using CARTO's `ST_Translate` function allows for dynamic offsetting of point coordinates based on zoom level, effectively creating "stacks" of markers at each location, providing both visual styling and interactivity with every point in the dataset.

Join CartoDB scientists Andy Eschbacher and Stuart Lynn for an Intermediate SQL Session at their Brooklyn office on January 12th, where you'll learn advanced SQL skills without building basic levels of SQL knowledge. The workshop will be held in the company's Bushwick location at 201 Moore Street, Brooklyn NY. This session is designed to help experienced data wranglers and web cartographers improve their skills, and those who need extra help on a project can attend the open office hours, which are also twice-monthly on Fridays.