May 2021 Summaries

The digital divide in the US is a significant issue, with rural areas facing slow, unreliable, and often costly internet connections. The Federal Universal Service High-Cost Program (Connect America Fund) was established to combat this issue, providing subsidies for rural broadband development and making it more cost-effective for telecommunications firms to bring affordable services to underserved areas. A map highlighting areas with less than 15% of households using broadband speed has been published by Microsoft, while The Center on Rural Innovation and the FCC have also provided insights into the lack of broadband availability in school districts across the US. The Connect America Fund's dataset provides detailed information on broadband deployment, including address coordinates, carrier names, deployment years, and minimum speeds available, allowing users to view the map and access this data through various filters and tools.

The Vital Village Network in Boston, Massachusetts, was established in 2010 by a group of practitioners at Boston Medical Center with the goal of improving health equity. The network has grown to include over 65 community-based agency partners and aims to maximize child, family, and community wellbeing through data analysis and visualization. One of the key objectives is to improve the quality of location data related to Boston and its surrounding area, which is used to promote family and community safety. The network has developed a range of visualizations, including dashboards on food access, early education, and housing access, to help community members understand social threats to child well-being and make informed decisions. These visualizations demonstrate the potential for spatial data analysis to solve pressing social and healthcare challenges in cities and communities.

CARTO has been selected by AI4Cities, an EU-funded project aiming to accelerate carbon neutrality in six European cities, to provide a solution for mobility challenges. The AI4Cities project brings together Helsinki, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Paris Region, Stavanger, and Tallinn, which have developed ambitious strategies to become carbon neutral by 2050. CARTO's solution, FutureUrbanMobility, optimizes the incorporation of new shared mobility modes into urban mobility planning, using Location Intelligence and Machine Learning to simulate the best location for micro-mobility services, support decision making based on predictive models, and improve user experience through gamification techniques. The project aims to address problem areas such as underutilized data sources, poor real-time traffic analysis, and lack of multimodal mobility platforms, ultimately reducing CO2 levels in city hotspots.

We are excited to share that we'll be participating as Petabyte sponsors of this year's Snowflake Summit taking place on 8-10 June, where we'll showcase innovative use cases such as investment analysis and geomarketing. We've seen a growing trend of Snowflake users using our platforms for spatial analytics in various industries like agriculture, including Indigo Ag's use of location data to power insights for their carbon program and grain marketplaces. Our team will be joined by experts from Indigo Ag to present real-life examples of how spatial data flows into map-centric apps that support day-to-day decision-making. We invite attendees to meet with our Spatial Data Science experts at the virtual booth to discuss using CARTO and Snowflake for spatial analytics.

OGC appoints Javier de la Torre to its Board of Directors as part of the consortium's efforts to make geospatial information and services FAIR. The Open Geospatial Consortium, a global forum of experts and communities using location to improve decision-making, has been at the cutting edge of open geospatial standards for nearly 30 years. With Javier de la Torre on its Board, OGC aims to bring a cloud native way of thinking to its work, while maintaining its commitment to creating sustainable futures for all generations.

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought about significant changes in various industries, including retail tourism and real estate. With more people working from home (WFH), there is an accelerated shift towards remote work, leading to structural changes in the commercial real estate sector. This trend is expected to benefit some Commercial Real Estate assets that foster collaboration and innovation, while also increasing demand for workspace analytics to optimize variable capacity and safeguard distancing measures. Technology and data providers are capitalizing on this trend by offering insights to support Real Estate players' decision-making. Additionally, there is an increased need for indoor analytics in shopping malls and airports to manage social distancing and collect data on retail units. Green space usage analysis is also gaining importance as people desire properties with gardens and balconies. Location Intelligence can help urban planners and real estate developers understand the usage of green spaces and their impact on nearby populations. The shift towards WFH has driven changes in residential rents, with supercities experiencing a decline, while Neighborhood Analysis can be used to identify new opportunities for converting commercial RE into residential RE and adapting neighborhoods to provide services to new audiences.

The city of Portland, Oregon collected more waste in 2020 than any other year on record due to increased residential waste and a lack of recycling care during the pandemic. This has led to concerns about littering and the need for intelligent smart city solutions in waste management. The Dedalo Cities platform, built on CARTO, offers real-time management of waste, optimization of container filling and recycling, and route optimization using IoT data, aiming to reduce costs and environmental impact. By combining smart sensor information with a citizen app, the solution provides detailed insights into waste production, container inventory, and network status, enabling more efficient waste collection and minimizing negative effects on cities.