February 2021 Summaries

CARTO has partnered with Foursquare, a leader in location technology and data, to expand its Data Observatory with their point-of-interest (POI) and foot traffic data. This partnership aims to provide customers with high-quality and standardized location data for business decision-making. Foursquare's POI data, known as Foursquare Places, offers attributes such as name, address, social media handles, and ratings, while Foursquare Visits provides insights into foot traffic trends and purchasing patterns. The inclusion of this data in CARTO's Data Observatory enables customers to make accurate geospatial decisions and accelerate innovation across their business, with potential applications including site selection, geomarketing, market analysis, and more.

Announcing #SDSC21: A Series of Spatial Data Science Events will be held online this year, bringing together experts in data science, advanced analytics, and GIS from across the globe. The main event will take place October 25th-28th, with two additional industry-specific events: the Spatial Data Science in Financial Services Summit and the Spatial Data Science in CPG & Retail Summit. These events aim to support businesses and organizations that need location-based insights to adapt to changing market conditions. The Financial Services summit will focus on next-generation use cases for geospatial data, while the CPG & Retail summit will explore the importance of understanding consumer behavior through location-based analytics. Both events feature prominent speakers from various industries, including Tim Kiely, Rayne Gaisford, and Neera Chatterjee, who will discuss their experiences with spatial data science applications in finance, retail, and more. Registration is now open for all three events.

The DAS Cropping Hub is a spatial web application built using breakthrough AI to detect crop types and predict crop yield based on historical data and proven CSIRO science, providing insights across Australia's Winter cropping regions in real-time. The hub leverages industry-leading agribusiness data workflow and collaboration tools, enabling stakeholders from farmers to finance, insurance, investors, rural real estate, logistics, commodity handlers, and government to make informed decisions with fast and accurate data. The application uses Google Earth Engine to classify what crop is growing where in around 1.7M paddocks across Australia and applies a proprietary yield prediction algorithm developed by CSIRO, summarizing data by State and Local Government Areas for more accurate crop intelligence by geolocation.

The CARTO BigQuery Tiler is now available in general availability, allowing users to create and publish map tilesets from their Google BigQuery data. This solution enables users to directly access BigQuery through the CARTO platform, with features such as automatic connection creation, service account integration, and tileset visualization within the dashboard. The new Maps API 2.0 provides support for TileJSON endpoints and is designed for compatibility and scalability. Users can generate and serve tilesets directly on their data warehouse, eliminating the need to export data from BigQuery. Pricing is based on processing tiers, with a competitive structure that charges users per GigaByte of data processed. The CARTO Spatial Analytics on BigQuery toolbox offers a comprehensive solution for spatial analysis, including visualization, enrichment, route calculation, geocoding, and machine learning capabilities. Users can start using the BigQuery Tiler now and explore its capabilities in more detail through documentation and demo requests.