July 2020 Summaries

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on Spain's tourism industry, with many countries easing out of lockdown and tourists eager to enjoy vacations. To ensure health and safety while avoiding overcrowding, Location Intelligence can be used alongside other technologies. The Valencia region in Spain is one of the most popular destinations, with over 340 beaches, and the Generalitat Valenciana government has developed a web app called "Zonas de Bany CV" to provide visitors with information on beach capacity. The tool geolocates beaches and bathing areas, displaying daily capacity status, characteristics, weather forecasts, and place reservations. This initiative aims to increase security and peace of mind for tourists, encouraging them to return to the region's beaches and positioning it as a leading worldwide tourist destination.

Google BigQuery and CARTO provide a next-generation spatial data infrastructure, enabling organizations to analyze their location data. Governments and corporate organizations are utilizing Google Cloud Platform with CARTO to create intuitive COVID-19 dashboards in the cloud, which have become essential for decision-making processes across various sectors. These dashboards offer real-time insights into COVID-19 trends, helping organizations make informed decisions on topics such as PPE supply chains, economic recovery, and workplace return plans. By leveraging Google BigQuery's capabilities, users can create their own dashboards to drive data-driven decision making.

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on retail, with varying levels of decline and recovery across different regions. To survive and optimize their response to the recovery, retailers must invest in technology and explore new sources of consumer data. Geosocial data, which captures social media behaviors and other non-traditional data points, can provide valuable insights into consumer behavior and preferences. When combined with credit card transaction data, geosocial data reveals relationships between social media behaviors and restaurant sales, highlighting the importance of tailoring marketing strategies to local demographics and preferences. The analysis also highlights differences in how counter-cultural segments relate to restaurant sales in different cities, suggesting that progressive cultures may be more accepting of certain behaviors. By leveraging retail data analytics, businesses can gain quantified insights into consumer behavior and preferences, enabling them to make more informed location decisions and optimize their marketing strategies.

The integration of CARTO with Databricks aims to empower data scientists by providing a seamless workflow for data analysis, visualization, and machine learning. CARTO's Direct SQL Connection feature allows users to access their database from Databricks notebooks, enabling transformations such as wide-to-long conversions that are challenging in relational databases. In contrast, CARTOframes is a Python package that enables spatial analysis, enrichment, and stunning visualizations directly within the notebook, ideal for geospatial data visualization or when scalability is not an issue. Users can access these features by following specific instructions to set up connections and install packages, with support available from Customer Success Managers for any issues encountered.

The Google BigQuery Visualization leverages the GDELT Project's Global Geographic Graph, a dataset covering more than 1.7 billion location mentions in worldwide English language news coverage since April 2017. The project integrates with Google BigQuery to enable users to map this huge dataset, creating interactive maps that display locations mentioned in news coverage during specific time periods or contexts, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. By using a SQL query from BigQuery, users can connect their data to the CARTO platform and easily visualize, perform spatial analyses, and build applications. The integration allows for seamless mapping of global news narratives, providing valuable insights into human society.

The rapidly changing economy requires organizations to access and analyze global high-quality spatial data, particularly in industries such as retail and commercial real estate, where accurate models are critical. A partnership between CARTO and Michael Bauer International (MBI) enables clients to access MBI's renowned high-quality data through the Data Observatory, which includes datasets on sociodemographics, consumer spending, and retail centrality, covering over 150 countries. This partnership also provides digital boundaries for administrative census and postal regions, allowing users to build visualizations that enable business leaders to make informed decisions at a more granular level. CARTO's platform and data support customers in gaining deeper location-based insights globally.

Google Analytics is a crucial tool for businesses, providing insights into website traffic, paid ad campaigns, and purchase behavior. However, the location data attached to each prospect's activity is often underutilized and hidden beneath dashboards and reports. By ingesting Google Analytics data into BigQuery and visualizing it in CARTO, businesses can uncover powerful stories about their customers and prospects that were previously undiscoverable. With CARTO, users can drill down into city-level data to see how users are engaging with content or products, perform meaningful spatial analysis, and answer questions such as "From which cities do we see the most demand for our products?" or "In which cities do we see high cart abandonment rates?" The integration of Google Analytics data in BigQuery enables businesses to prepare their data for spatial analysis, making it easier to visualize and perform spatial analyses. By leveraging CARTO, businesses can gain valuable insights into their online audience and make data-driven decisions.