August 2024 Summaries

CARTO Locations Madrid, the second annual Location Intelligence Summit, brought together over 300 attendees from various industries to discuss advancements in Location Intelligence and Geospatial Analytics. The event featured presentations on data privacy and security, smart cities projects, data visualization, and more. CARTO Locations New York will take place from May 23rd-24th, offering opportunities for professionals working with location data visualization, cartography, and related fields to learn about the latest developments in Location Intelligence.

The Spatial Data Science Conference (SDSC24) NYC edition will take place on October 16th and 17th at Columbia University and Jay Suites, Bryant Park. This year's conference will feature hands-on technical workshops, a range of topics and tools, and an exciting lineup of speakers exploring the use of AI and spatial analytics to tackle global challenges such as advancing education, digital equity, sustainable agriculture, climate action, transportation systems, neighborhood change, and real estate dynamics. Tickets are still available for purchase.

Today we are excited to announce a new partnership with Mapbox that better integrates our services with one another, making it easier for customers to use both services together. As of today, Mapbox will be our default provider for Location Based Services, including geocoding and routing services, for most CARTO enterprise accounts, running Mapbox under the hood when users geocode data inside the platform. This change enables new capabilities such as last week's announcement that CARTO Engine now supports Mapbox Vector Tiles, ensuring users have the best experiences with both technologies. The partnership marks a shift towards innovation in the GIS industry, embracing new data streams and sources, and developing new methods and analyses customized to these new data types. With this new stack, Mapbox + CARTO's spatial analytics capabilities make working with location data and spatial analytics simpler, faster, and more efficient for users building location apps with spatial analytics capabilities.

Data enrichment is a process that enhances refines or otherwise augments existing data, typically with imported datasets, to generate location-specific information. This helps analysts create actionable insights from incomplete inconsistent or incorrect data. Geocoding can standardize address data into latitude and longitude coordinates, while routing information can calculate distances between points and optimize routes. Enriching point data with areas of influence analysis creates contoured lines displaying calculated levels over a surface area, enabling precise definition of polygons. Incorporating demographic measures provides additional context on customer or target audience characteristics, such as age, race, education level, occupation, average income, and political party affiliation. By implementing data enrichment, businesses can turn raw data into profitable outcomes and support location-driven decision making.

A data storytelling project called A Million Walks in the Park was conducted using one month of nationwide GPS data from LiveRamp, focusing on public spaces specifically parks across New York City to understand social interactions among New Yorkers. The goal was to highlight the difference between raw data and information, extracting meaningful insights from noisy location data. The team demonstrated how structured data visualization can add meaning to this type of data, providing descriptive insights into foot traffic patterns, popular areas, and shared experiences in parks. By zooming in on a granular scale, they built an interactive tool to filter the data according to park characteristics, offering more detailed information on activity in smaller parks. The final section ranked parks according to their performance based on visitor count per square foot, revealing insights into the use of space throughout New York City and suggesting destinations for escaping city wear and tear or visiting well-known landmarks.

The Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data is a network of over 300 organizations working together to democratize global data access and achieve the UN's Sustainable Development Goals. The partnership aims to harness global data and make it more open for those looking to achieve the SDGs, with a focus on Location Intelligence as a key component in the open technological ecosystem necessary for attaining the goals. A Data for Development Festival is being held in March, followed by the Bristol Data Dive, which will challenge data scientists and development practitioners to use Location Intelligence tools to identify pressing transportation and mobility problems in cities like Bristol and Bogota. The Global Partnership is also revamping its API Highways project to standardize APIs and open datasets, providing a hub for collaboration and making it easier for partners to work together.

This blog discusses the use of APIs in retrieving spatial data. It explains that APIs are essential components of Modern Geospatial Tech Stack and allow for faster, more seamless, and scalable data sharing. REST APIs have become the industry standard for retrieving, sharing, and managing spatial data due to their simplicity, statelessness, scalability, interoperability, and wide adoption. However, challenges include complexity, rate limits, reliability issues, and versioning problems. The blog provides a step-by-step guide on how to retrieve spatial data using APIs, including selecting an API, reading its documentation, constructing a URL with parameters, integrating the data into spatial analysis or mapping tools, and handling potential challenges.

The Seattle Poetic Grid is an interdisciplinary project that maps the sounds of community within a smart city, tracing the city in the voices of its citizens to hear the personal map[s] of the place we inhabit. The interactive data visualization was created by Claudia Castro Luna, a Civic Poet, and Gregory T. Woolston, a cartographer and architecture graduate student, who used CARTO's Location Intelligence platform to bring their vision to life. The project aims to convey an immediate sense of place through poems placed on a map in specific locations meaningful to the writers, showcasing multiple voices and experiences. The interactive features of the map enable temporal equality among all the voices represented, allowing viewers to explore each other's feelings and concerns, with the hope that it inspires similar projects in other cities.

Modernizing Catchment Areas With Human Mobility Data` Using modern data streams, such as mobile phone or foot traffic data, can create customer catchments that are more specific and reflective of human behavior, rather than hypothetical assumptions based on isochrones. By cleaning and aggregating the data, businesses can model trips around their location and map the origins and destinations of those journeys, providing a clearer picture of who their target customers are. This approach can be used in conjunction with traditional isochrone maps to provide a more nuanced understanding of customer behavior and preferences, allowing businesses to make more informed decisions about marketing, investment, and other business strategies.

Three businesses, including CARTO, have leveraged location intelligence to support green initiatives and combat climate change. Vizonomy's Climate Risk Platform assesses the impact of climate change using open source software that helps local governments reduce costs associated with risk analysis by 80 percent. Global Forest Watch provides environmental insights through deforestation initiatives, while SimpleWater uses spatial analysis and location data to identify sources of water pollution and promote clean water quality. These projects demonstrate how location intelligence can transform data into outcomes for environmentally-conscious businesses.

The Internet of Things (IoT) has evolved into a reality that businesses cannot ignore, with potential economic impact estimated to be between $3.9 trillion and $11.1 trillion by 2025. IoT is fundamentally concerned with Location Intelligence, leading to major improvements in smart city retail and real estate industries. In 2018, three location intelligence trends are expected to shape the industry, including smarter cities with less traffic, personalization of the retail experience, and using psychographic data in commercial real estate. These trends will enable businesses to implement sophisticated strategies leveraging connected technology and hyper-location specific data.

Digital marketers are seeking alternative ad-tech solutions to Facebook and Google's online advertising "duopoly" that accounted for 63% of all U.S. digital ad revenue in 2017, specifically looking for an agnostic platform that can process different types of location data, especially mobile data, to design and deploy geomarketing campaigns. Location Intelligence is accelerating innovations in geomarketing, enabling marketers to move conversions from interested to intend to purchase by adding geospatial context to historical data on sales or searches. Powerful solutions like Vodafone Analytics are helping build location audience segments by bringing together Location Intelligence and mobile data to study past customer visits to specific store locations or other points of interest, allowing retailers to attribute in-store visits to online campaigns and answer questions such as where to focus geomarketing campaigns and where to locate new stores to meet demand from underserved segments. Behavioral customer segmentation is also becoming increasingly important, particularly in the tourism industry, where VisitBritain must determine where high-value markets are located and allocate budgetary resources accordingly. As mobile location-based advertising on devices is expected to skyrocket with U.S. ad spend exceeding $38.7 billion by 2022, marketing and advertising firms can stay ahead of the curve using Location Intelligence solutions for geomarketing campaigns today.

### Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) industry is adapting to changing consumer habits due to limited population growth and wage stagnation in developed markets, resulting in a shift towards two key groups: Survivalists (millennials and retirees on a budget) and Selectionists (Baby Boomers and Gen X with disposable incomes). CPG companies are using location data to identify where products fit within these socioeconomic divides and supply them to the right customers at the right time. This includes analyzing weather patterns, tourist density, and demographic data to inform product placement and marketing strategies. The use of Location Intelligence is transforming various roles across CPG companies, including Trade Marketing Managers, Brand Managers, Sales Managers, and Operations Managers, who are now using external and internal data to drive strategic decisions such as product launches, point-of-sale planning, territory management, and supply chain network design.

The Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development has created a new version of its Displacement Alert Map 2.0, a tool to visualize and understand housing displacement in New York City. The map uses open data from multiple sources, including NYC Open Data, to display four risk layers: deregulation, new sale, construction, and eviction risks. The map provides interactive features such as zooming, searching, and detailed views of specific buildings, making it easier for users to explore and advocate for change in their neighborhoods. The project is a prime example of how organizations can use Location Intelligence tools to solve complex problems with modern technical solutions.

Gartner has found a significant increase in the adoption of territory management software since 2012, as more companies adopt data-driven strategies to improve sales performance. Many companies still design sales territories based on predefined geographic boundaries, which can lead to uneven distribution of deals and poor utilization of sales executives' time. Forward-thinking B2B sales and operations directors are using location intelligence to set themselves apart from their competition by incorporating diverse datasets related to customer value, size, and behavior into their sales territory management. To redesign sales territories effectively, companies should establish clear goals and objectives, explore territory designs for balance and alignment, and optimize sales territory routes using advanced routing capabilities. By doing so, they can increase business implementation of territory management software, improve sales productivity, and reduce operational spending.

Amazon's acquisition of Whole Foods led to record-breaking merger and acquisition activity among competitors, with U.S.-based deals valued at $1.03 trillion dollars in the first half of 2018. The Target-Kroger merger scenario was simulated using Location Intelligence to identify stores for consolidation and minimize sales cannibalization risks while increasing trade area coverage. Spatial analysis revealed that nearby locations assume randomness in data distribution, but consumer spending patterns are influenced by contextual factors such as population density and transportation modes. Calculating travel time isolines helped identify stores with high trade area overlap, resulting in 420 Kroger stores being prioritized for consolidation. The merger would increase Target's trade area coverage nationwide by 86% while reducing Kroger's footprint, providing customers with a larger selection of merchandise and inventory using Target's existing infrastructure.

In today's digital landscape, location intelligence is a crucial component of effective digital marketing campaigns, enabling marketers to target specific audiences, optimize ad placement, and measure ROI with precision.` This paragraph highlights the importance of maps and location data in digital marketing, from campaign strategy to execution and evaluation, providing insights into audience demographics, micro-targeting, proximity marketing, and correlation between geotargeted advertising and sales.

The NYC bus system has an opportunity to solve the city's transit woes by improving its service, which could be relatively painless compared to repairing the subway system. A consortium of organizations analyzed bus arrival times using location data and mapped routes to offer three major solutions: redesigning bus networks for frequent and efficient service, expediting the boarding process, and allowing dispatchers to take advantage of existing technology. By implementing these practical solutions, the Bus Turnaround Coalition aims to improve the flow of traffic for 2.5 million New Yorkers taking the bus every weekday.

The outdoor advertising industry is facing pressure to innovate and adapt to changing consumer behaviors, with digital out-of-home (DOOH) and programmatic advertising gaining popularity. To stay ahead, companies are recognizing the importance of location intelligence in their data strategy, using third-party data and geolocated insights to deliver ROI on investments made on digital infrastructure. Location intelligence is being used to identify optimal locations for billboards, segment audiences by target market, and enable real-time trading platforms with moment marketing capabilities. Interactivity through technologies like NFC beacons and geofenced promotions will also make billboards points of sale, further narrowing the gap between online and offline measurement of campaign ROI.

The use of open data and location intelligence is becoming increasingly important in urban planning, with many local governments leveraging these tools to optimize services, prepare for challenges such as climate change and urban migration, and improve the quality of life for citizens. Examples include projects like InfoAmazonia Colombia, which uses satellite information and crowdsourced data to monitor forest clearing and promote sustainable development, and EnergyBlock, a smart city project in Copenhagen that monitors energy production levels and local food production in rooftop greenhouses. Other notable examples include the use of open data portals to track biker ridership volumes, public works traffic management systems to combat congestion, and civic engagement projects like City Maps from Tourists Feelings, which maps cities based on tourist perceptions. These projects demonstrate the potential for open data and location intelligence to create more sustainable, resilient, and responsive smart cities.

Dan Cookson's recent map of new homes built in England over the last decade is a beautiful and incisive visualization that represents the decade of development from 2007 to 2017, highlighting hotspots of new construction. The map includes the ability to toggle layers representing administrative boundaries clusters and the UK's unique Green Belt zones, providing deeper insight for planners and policy makers looking for societal change and impact of policy decisions. This tool can be a useful asset in navigating the changing real estate landscape. Dan's motivation for creating this visualization was born from a frustration that no one had properly identified where all the new homes built in England over the last decade had been built, and he used open data from the Land Registry to overcome this challenge. The map was built using the ONS Postcode Directory open data set, but some key information was missing, which limited its effectiveness. Despite these limitations, the map revealed several surprises, including that it was the first national-level mapping exercise of its kind, and that local councils were making use of it to inform their planning decisions. Dan sees great benefits in using CARTO for mapping interesting data, particularly in terms of ease of use and sharing complex spatial datasets. He believes that governments, the real estate industry, and individuals can benefit from his map and deeper dive into open data by gaining better insights and understanding of place, and by inspiring others to create similar interfaces with information.

Amazon acquired Whole Foods Market for $14 billion, a move that could significantly alter the US grocery industry. The acquisition is valuable because it grants Amazon access to Whole Foods' sophisticated location planning process, which has identified affluent customer demographics and locations with high demand for natural and organic products. By inheriting this data, Amazon will be able to analyze consumption patterns and optimize supply and demand on a hyper-local level, reducing waste and improving logistics. The acquisition also provides Amazon with 431 prime-location distribution nodes, which can be used to enhance its delivery capabilities, including aerial warehouses and drone-based services. Overall, the deal is about leveraging location data to drive sales and growth, both online and offline.

The text highlights the growing issue of displacement worldwide, with 65.6 million people displaced from their homes in the last year alone, making it comparable to Great Britain and France in terms of population. The refugee crisis is a global problem requiring powerful solutions, and location data plays a crucial role in addressing this challenge. Several projects are featured that utilize mapping technology to monitor refugee movements, provide logistical insights for support services, and tell the stories of refugees, aiming to humanize their experiences and raise awareness about the challenges they face. These initiatives aim to maximize impact by leveraging location intelligence to inform policy decisions, provide context, and mobilize resources to alleviate risks faced by refugees.

In the ecommerce landscape, companies like Bonobos, Warby Parker, Rent the Runway, Birchbox, and MADE.com have successfully transitioned from online-only businesses to brick-and-mortar retailers by leveraging Location Intelligence. These digitally native vertical brands have reverse-engineered traditional site planning practices, utilizing data from shipment orders, parcel distribution strategies, subscription-based retail models, and crowdsourced data from geomarketing campaigns to inform their location decisions. By harnessing the power of data, these companies have disrupted traditional retail experiences, raised brand awareness, and improved customer service, ultimately driving innovation in the retail space.

The logistics industry faces pressure due to rising costs, a shrinking labor force, and unrealistic customer expectations. To address this, companies are using spatial data science to build data models that simulate existing network conditions, providing insights on existing constraints, inefficient territory assignments, and more. By analyzing transportation problems in the first mile logistics network, companies can define distribution routes, reduce fuel and labor costs, and improve delivery times. An Origin-Destination Matrix is used to determine global combinations for distance and time travel estimates, while a logistics optimization algorithm applies constraints to filter down to optimal routes. The Location Intelligence imperative is driving logistics planning, enabling scenarios such as removing fulfillment centers from the network due to outages or natural disasters, and finding optimal routes at certain times of day to avoid traffic and high toll prices.

This map shows the communities most vulnerable to Hurricane Irma The text highlights the challenges of predicting and preparing for a hurricane, particularly in terms of identifying at-risk neighborhoods and delivering life-saving resources to those who need them most. The author has created a map using publicly available datasets to visualize areas likely to be affected by Hurricane Irma and their relative social vulnerability. This map aims to help public officials, relief organizations, and other support personnel identify the most vulnerable communities and tailor their messaging and strategies to address specific demographic challenges, such as language proficiency and mobility. The text also emphasizes the importance of visualizing data to understand the impact of a hurricane on different communities and to develop targeted responses to mitigate its effects.

Visualizing and analyzing location data is crucial for businesses making site planning decisions, as it provides strategic insights into potential markets, customer bases, and transportation patterns. By combining demographic, lifestyle, and mobility data with spatial analysis techniques, businesses can identify optimal locations for new stores, distribution centers, or online platforms. This approach helps retailers and companies understand the surrounding context of a site, making informed decisions that drive growth and competitiveness in today's hyper-competitive landscape.

Enigma Labs, an operational data management and intelligence company, used the 4-step Location Intelligence process to turn public sanctions data into insightful visualizations and analysis. They applied this process to thousands of data points, enriching them with context and enabling users to take action by exploring how sanctions have evolved based on geography, administration, and geopolitical events. By aggregating historical sanctions records and working with subject matter experts, Enigma successfully cleaned, visualized, analyzed, and took action on the data, uncovering interesting insights such as the global nature of sanctions programs and their intersection in specific localities. The outcome is a publicly accessible Sanctions Tracker that empowers users to make better foreign policy decisions by providing real-time information on changes to sanctions programs.

The collaborative efforts between local governments, entrepreneurs, and developers in using open data to create innovative solutions are gaining momentum, particularly in the context of location intelligence. The Go Code Colorado app challenge has demonstrated the potential for successful businesses that pair open data with location-based insights, showcasing the value of publicly available data in addressing business challenges. By leveraging location data, teams have developed applications such as water discovery and analysis tools, noise analysis software, and platforms to help small farmers find under-utilized truck space. This model serves as a great example for states looking to leverage open data more effectively and for entrepreneurs contemplating the development of successful business ideas that can create sustainable success.

CJ Marple, a 3rd grade teacher in Kansas, created a Twitter project to teach his students about the power of social media and information spread. He tweeted about his lesson, expecting engagement from his local community, but instead, it went viral with over a million engagements, including retweets from celebrities and responses from across the world. To help him visualize the data, Twitter used CARTO to create an animated map that showed the location of retweets, mapping out the spread of information in real-time. The map provided CJ's students with a valuable teaching tool, allowing them to see how their message had spread globally and when it happened, providing a complete view of the pattern of retweets using a histogram. This project demonstrated the power of visualizing location data to understand the world around us and our interactions with systems every day.

The WaterHack 2018 event was a partnership between ONGAWA and Vizzuality, aimed at analyzing survey data collected by ONGAWA to promote human development and social change in Tanzanian villages. The participants used programming languages like R and Python, interface tools like pandas and CARTOframes, and Javascript libraries like D3.js and CARTO.js to explore the survey data. They discovered that building a vulnerability index could help relief organizations allocate resources effectively, and created data visualizations such as maps of water accessibility and travel time. These discoveries highlighted the problem's multidimensional nature and the impact of water insecurity on gender inequality, emphasizing the importance of working with data sharing technologies to find sustainable solutions to combat climate change.

The NYC Pride Parade has a significant physical and spatial impact on the city, with many people visiting commercial areas and destinations like 14th Street, gay bars, hotels, transit hubs, and convention centers after the parade. The analysis of taxi data from 2016 shows that people tend to congregate in these areas, which are likely to be popular spots for post-parade celebrations and events. The study provides insight into the behavior of Pride-goers and can be used to better understand the impact of the parade on local businesses and transit.

Drive Omnichannel Retail Success with Location Intelligence and New Data Streams` Rising eCommerce has changed the retail game, with global online sales projected to reach over $4 trillion by 2021, leading many experts to assert that offline retail is entering its twilight years. However, brick-and-mortar retailers can thrive in this environment by adopting omnichannel strategies that engage consumers across multiple platforms and devices. Location Intelligence techniques and new data streams are essential for improving these business plans, enabling retailers to deliver targeted experiences to their customers at every touchpoint. By analyzing demographic data, such as age, gender, and spending habits, retailers can create tailored marketing campaigns that drive return business and optimize site planning for maximum foot traffic. With the help of tools like Vodafone Analytics and CARTO's Foot Traffic data stream, retailers can make informed decisions about location selection, site optimization, and omnichannel efforts.

Compete on Convenience: Profitable Retail Delivery` To compete in the narrowing retail landscape, retailers must differentiate themselves from Amazon and other ecommerce giants by offering convenience as well as quality and service. Location Intelligence can help retailers create designated delivery territories, optimize routes, and plan for premium services like set delivery windows without breaking the bank. By using tools like CARTOframes and Google's Optimization tools, retailers can build an efficient territory map and solve the Vehicle Routing Problem to minimize costs while meeting constraints. This solution enables small and medium-sized retailers to stay competitive with ecommerce giants by leveraging local brand loyalty and recognition, driving deeper understanding of purchasing patterns, and maximizing profitability in near real-time.

Mobile data offers a potent tool for analyzing trends and solving today's greatest challenges, particularly in understanding patterns and behaviors of citizens, workers, or consumers. By leveraging mobile data, businesses can gain insights into foot traffic, customer demographics, and behavior, which can inform marketing efforts, urban planning, transportation management, and real estate development strategies. The use of spatial analytics and visualization techniques can help answer complex questions, such as identifying areas of influence, optimizing advertising campaigns, and predicting outcomes in commercial real estate. By harnessing the power of mobile data, organizations can make data-driven decisions that drive growth, improve efficiency, and enhance customer experiences.

This Map Shows Attendance of Over 1,000 US Protests in 2017`: Count Love is an open-source tool that collects, visualizes, and shares protest data nationwide. It started collecting data on January 21, 2017, with the Women's March, and has since aggregated data from over 1,000 protests. The platform uses a web crawler and text extractor to scan local newspapers and TV stations for keywords related to protests. Count Love addresses challenges in data accuracy by using conservative crowd size estimates. A mobile app allows individuals to register their attendance at specific events, providing anonymized protest data. The platform has discovered surprising insights into the activities, attitudes, and values of protesters, including geographic and temporal trends. By working with a data agnostic platform like CARTO, users can easily visualize and explore protest data.

A Better Approach to Sales Territory Management Using Spatial Clustering` Sales territory management is a challenging task, with severe consequences if not done properly, including high overhead costs, lower employee retention, decreased productivity, and inconsistent customer service. Many sales teams rely on outdated systems such as zip codes to carve out territories, rather than using data intelligence to increase business growth and productivity. However, by using spatially constrained clustering analysis (SKATER), it is possible to create distinct groups of customers taking into account metrics such as revenue, profit, and number of employees. This approach allows for a better understanding of the different types of customers or prospects that need to be handled by sales teams. By incorporating more data, such as industry or competitor data, sales teams can create more sophisticated and efficient territory management systems. Data visualization also enables companies to determine the best location for new sales offices, taking into account how it would affect nearby sales territories. With insights like these, businesses have seen a 22% increase in sales growth when using CARTO for territory management.

Location intelligence is becoming a core part of most enterprise business strategies, with 85% of surveyed executives believing it will be crucial to their organization's success in the next three years. This shift away from traditional Geographic Information Systems (GIS) is driven by new data streams, including open data, real-time data, and big datasets from various sources. Location intelligence also introduces new methods of analysis, such as spatial clustering, optimized routing, and Moran's I, which enable companies to answer questions about what should happen and optimize their business strategy accordingly. Furthermore, location intelligence is making it accessible to a wider range of users, including developers, data analysts, and data scientists, who can integrate location data directly into their workflows and present findings in compelling visualizations. The rise of open-source tools and platforms is also democratizing access to location intelligence, allowing companies to create easily deployable dashboards and apps that help predict and optimize business outcomes.

Most organizations are replete with data and data sources, but extracting insights to answer important questions using Location Intelligence (LI) is crucial for effective data-driven decision making. A well-structured approach to LI implementation involves strategizing, assembling a cross-functional team, setting clear goals and objectives, identifying the initial business question, building an ecosystem of support, enriching internal datasets, visualizing data, analyzing findings, and taking action based on insights gained. By following this comprehensive guide, organizations can unlock the full potential of location intelligence to inform and influence decisions company-wide.

The healthcare marketing trend to watch in 2018 is the adoption of geomarketing, which has seen quick growth in consumer-focused transactional industries like retail. However, it's been a more gradual process in healthcare due to compliance regulations and data governance issues. Despite these challenges, healthcare geomarketing is expected to accelerate as healthcare surpasses retail as the largest sector of the location market by 2020. Location intelligence tools can help healthcare marketers identify optimal areas for marketing efforts, target high volumes of smokers or patients with specific needs, and even inform business decisions such as where to locate new pharmacies or store expansions. CVS Health's recent campaign is a prime example of how geomarketing can be used to promote health and wellness initiatives, drive sales, and build brand loyalty. By leveraging location data, healthcare marketers can create targeted campaigns that not only promote healthy behaviors but also optimize business practices.

Vodafone, a leading telecommunications company, is partnering with CARTO to provide advanced location analytics and IoT technology for MTV Music Week Bizkaia, an upcoming music festival in Bizkaia. The partnership aims to optimize event management through sensors that generate insights on waste management, temperature, humidity, noise monitoring, energy efficiency, and population movement. Event organizers will use Vodafone Analytics to gain key insights into visitor demographics, catchment areas, and the economic impact of the event on the city. After the festival, they will be able to access real-time data from IoT sensors and mobile events, enabling a more sustainable and data-driven approach to running global events.

Amazon's second headquarters, HQ2, will significantly impact the chosen site's physical and economic landscape, affecting local residents, businesses, and government policies. Analyzing Amazon's impact on Seattle, where the company has undergone significant transformations since its founding, can provide insights into potential effects on candidate sites like Washington D.C. and Bethesda Maryland. Location Intelligence and multiple data streams can help municipal leaders anticipate changes by understanding development patterns, housing prices, social vulnerability, and commercial growth around HQ2 locations, enabling informed policy decisions and strategic planning for local businesses and Amazon itself.

The HALO Trust, a UK-based NGO, has been working in Nagorno-Karabakh since 2000 to clear landmines and unexploded ordnance, with the goal of protecting lives and restoring livelihoods. The region, which is part of Azerbaijan but disputed by Armenia, has been affected by decades of conflict, resulting in around 20,000 deaths and hundreds of thousands displaced. Landmines have had a devastating impact on the local population, particularly children, who are disproportionately affected. To visualize and summarize data, HALO uses CARTO technology, which allows for near real-time updates and dynamic analysis, enabling the organization to demonstrate its impact through mine clearance programs in 16 countries worldwide.

Three e-commerce companies, Amazon, Warby Parker, and Bonobos, are successfully opening brick and mortar stores to extend their online brands, leveraging location data to determine store locations, tailor products and marketing to specific geographic regions, and create a personalized boutique experience. These hybrid retailers have distinct advantages over traditional competition, including hyper-local branding and real-time customer targeting. As a result, they are proving successful in the retail landscape, with Amazon and Warby Parker already becoming household names, and Bonobos expanding its reach through strategic store openings and customer data analysis. The success of these retailers is driven by their use of location intelligence to gain insights into customer behavior, uncover market opportunities, and reduce costs, ultimately winning in a competitive retail environment where brick and mortar stores still hold certain advantages over the online experience.

The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project has found a correlation between foreclosure rates, race, and redlining policies in San Francisco through spatial analysis and visualization. This project uses location intelligence to deliver insight into the impact of discriminatory practices on housing markets, providing important context for understanding urban policy. The project's approach is changing the way cities tell this story, making it easier to understand the realities of gentrification and its effects on communities. By visualizing and analyzing location data, the project sheds light on the complex relationships between socioeconomic discrepancies, historical policies, and demographic changes in neighborhoods.

Consulting firms are facing increasing pressure to present innovative solutions to clients that go beyond traditional powerpoint presentations or static PDF reports. To address these challenges, consultants can leverage Location Intelligence platforms, which offer an interactive format that empowers clients with analysis and insights. By providing a central data repository, facilitating custom analytics, and leaving behind a tool for clients to maintain, Location Intelligence enables consultants to build trust and secure future business. Consulting firms are adopting digital professional services and packaging digital service offerings around disciplinary specialties and industry expertise, making it essential to present solutions in an engaging and interactive manner.

The number of charitable organizations around the world continues to grow, with over 1.5 million registered in the United States alone. These organizations often collect data but lack the bandwidth or knowledge to analyze it, making Location Intelligence tools like CARTO a valuable resource for improving impact and operations. Azavea, a geospatial software development firm, utilizes CARTO to support nonprofits and public sector clients with projects such as visualizing green initiatives, analyzing the effects of legislation, and helping organizations accomplish their mission. CARTO's scalability, PostgreSQL database, and REST API make it an ideal choice for these projects, allowing developers to create interactive web maps and display data in a user-friendly manner. Azavea also offers various charitable initiatives, including the Summer of Maps program, which matches nonprofit organizations with talented students pursuing careers in geospatial data analysis.

The changing neighborhoods of New York City are being studied by citizen-led organizations using geospatial technology, including CARTO's location intelligence platform. The Citizens Housing and Planning Council (CHPC) has released a report and interactive map demonstrating demographic shifts in NYC neighborhoods over the past ten years. This analysis used cluster analysis to identify 14 census tracts with shared traits. The New York City Mayor's Office is also using CARTO's technology to power a real-time data dashboard, providing citizens with insights into city performance and neighborhood changes. Understanding these shifts is crucial for informed policy-making and citizen-centric governance.

The Game of Thrones Basemap is a custom-designed map that uses thematic location data and basemaps to explore the relationship between the natural environment and modes of human interaction in the fictional world of Westeros. The map's design involves adding specific components such as rivers, roads, forests, cities, and the Great Wall, styled with techniques like shading terrain using color palettes to suggest elevation and curvature. The responsive styling allows viewers to explore the map further by zooming in on different regions and filtering data. The custom basemap can be inserted into CARTO Builder and is designed to help cartographers and data analysts tell better stories with location data.

The world's most powerful tool for understanding people is mobile devices, generating vast amounts of data that can be used to answer various business questions such as reducing traffic congestion and predicting changes in property value. Mobile data has been utilized to create insightful maps on foot traffic and public space usage, demographic tracking, app data, and traffic patterns, providing valuable information for businesses, policymakers, and individuals alike. These insights can inform decisions around site planning, investment, marketing, and safety, ultimately helping organizations make smarter and more agile decisions to improve their bottom lines and serve citizens or save lives.

The year 2017 was marked by a series of significant global events including environmental, social, and political moments that had far-reaching impacts on people around the globe. The Total Solar Eclipse brought people together in awe, while the global refugee crisis continued to be a major story with millions displaced due to conflict and persecution. International sanctions were imposed against nations like Russia, North Korea, and Iran, and cyber attacks became increasingly prevalent. Natural disasters such as hurricanes, earthquakes, and wildfires caused massive damage and loss of life, highlighting the importance of climate action. The Catalan independence referendum and Brexit sparked debate on separatist movements across Europe, while films and public symbols reflected cultural and geographical divides. The amplification of women's voices was also a notable trend in 2017, with major events such as the Women's Marches and the #MeToo movement shedding light on important social issues.

Location data is being used by nonprofits and humanitarian relief agencies to tackle various challenges, including water insecurity. To address this issue, organizations are leveraging location intelligence to enrich water data through crowdsourcing and external sources. The Regional Food Security Analysis Network (RFSAN) and cMapIT have successfully employed location intelligence to build interactive maps of water resources in Syria and Nigeria, respectively. These initiatives have provided situational awareness of the countries' ongoing humanitarian crises while raising transparency on water supply and consumption levels. Additionally, data visualizations are being used to highlight issues such as lead contamination in drinking water across the United States and global fishing practices that contribute to ocean pollution. By making near-real-time data available, these efforts aim to promote public accountability and citizen engagement, ultimately driving change and informing decision-making for a more sustainable future.

BBVA is using anonymized credit card data to better understand city-wide behavior by creating a network of connections between different areas of the city, identifying functional areas through spatial analysis and clustering, and describing communities through common attributes. This project aims to provide a new way of dividing cities into manageable parts, allowing for more accurate urban management of public and private services, as well as insights for businesses and governments. By analyzing credit card transactions, BBVA has created an interactive tool called Urban Discovery that enables users to select specific attributes and visualize community characteristics, with potential applications in citizen services, IoT, fleet routing and tracking, retail, and site planning.

The City Health Dashboard is a program created in partnership between NYU Langone Health and NYU's Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service, aiming to equip cities with comprehensive reliable data to build healthier and more equitable communities. The dashboard features 36 distinct measures of urban health across 500 American cities, tracked into five categories: social and economic factors, physical environment, health behavior, health outcomes, and clinical care. Users can select a city, choose a metric, and explore the data in various views, including charts, maps, and tabs, to gain insights into local health trends and relationships between metrics. The dashboard provides a unified aesthetic, using consistent color schemes across all views, and offers resources for cities to address health challenges and improve citizen lives. By offering granular views of local health metrics and comparative analysis against national datasets, the City Health Dashboard empowers city leaders with data-driven decision-making tools to boost local collaboration and improve citizen health nationwide.

Three Ways Retailers Increase Revenue with Location Intelligence` Retailers are leveraging technology investments to provide smarter data-driven retail experiences, and location intelligence is playing a crucial role. With more customers purchasing products in-store than online, retailers are using indoor maps to analyze consumer behaviors, providing personalized product recommendations, and creating custom location applications to enhance operational efficiency. By integrating these solutions, retailers can gain a competitive edge and increase revenue in 2017.

Wildfires in northern California have burned over 170,000 acres of land, destroyed thousands of structures, forced evacuations, and caused multiple deaths. Due to the rapid spread of these fires, traditional forecasting models are proving insufficient as they do not account for volatile weather conditions. Maps have been created to visualize active fire perimeters, smoke density levels, nearby vulnerable populations, and property risks to local agricultural businesses. These maps aim to provide vital information to residents, rescue agencies, and relief organizations while raising awareness of the long-term health hazards associated with high smoke exposure.

The Line 5 shutdown in Madrid had a significant impact on both residents and businesses. With support from IoT sensors and other smart devices, it was found that the decrease in commuters traveling into Madrid for 62 days also reduced economic activity along the Line 5's 32 stops. This disruption particularly affected suburban commuters who had limited alternative transportation options. By using location data from smart devices, public sector leaders can make smarter and more transparent decisions to improve mobility and infrastructure in their cities.

Cloud-native solutions like CARTO are becoming increasingly important for Life Sciences companies as they handle and analyze large volumes of geospatial data. By offering a fully cloud-native connection to Snowflake, CARTO provides unparalleled scalability and integration for spatial analysis. This enables organizations in the sector to process vast amounts of geospatial data seamlessly, uncovering patterns and insights crucial for optimizing operations and improving outcomes. Key benefits include streamlined deployment and maintenance, enhanced performance, and heightened security. Geospatial analytics offers transformative benefits for Life Sciences companies by enabling detailed spatial analysis and visualization in areas such as supply chain optimization, enhancing clinical trials operations, and targeted recruitment.

What is Supply Chain Network Design and How Does It Work?` explores the concept of optimizing supply chains through spatial analysis, which has become increasingly important for companies to reduce environmental impact, improve efficiency, and meet customer needs. By analyzing location data, organizations can identify ideal locations for distribution centers, reduce travel distances, cut costs, and ensure sustainability compliance. The article uses Publix, a grocery store chain, as an example of how spatial analysis can be used to optimize their supply chain in Florida, reducing travel distance by 12,000 miles and improving service delivery. Additionally, the article highlights Aramex's use of spatial analytics to optimize last-mile delivery operations and ensure resilience in the face of natural disasters or climate-related risks. The ultimate goal is to create a supply chain network that is not only cost-effective but also efficient, resilient, and sustainable.

Vision Zero, a popular initiative aiming to eliminate traffic fatalities and injuries, emphasizes the need for more traffic data analysis to better predict and prevent future accidents. By working with location data streams, cities can understand past mobility and movement patterns, which is crucial in identifying areas that require attention. A cost-effective alternative to traditional methods, this approach uses four types of location data to estimate the impact of a hypothetical car ban along a busy street segment. The analysis aims to find the optimal time for the car ban, identify drivers and pedestrians whose travel would be disrupted, and estimate commercial activity generated from the ban. The study used open municipal data and foot traffic derived from anonymized GPS mobile data to analyze traffic patterns on Mass Ave in Cambridge, Massachusetts. By aggregating and joining different datasets, the analysis revealed insights into mobility patterns, including the impact of a car ban on local residents and businesses. The study also identified commercial micro-regions and quantified spend and mobility patterns, providing estimates of lift in store visits and potential revenue. This approach can be replicated to address other traffic-related issues, offering new solutions to old problems.

The Open Government Partnership has seen a significant increase in countries participating, with 70 countries involved in 2016 compared to just 7 in 2011. Despite this growth, evidence of open data's impact remains limited to only a few countries. Open government data is used in many daily activities, such as searching for weather information or navigating public transportation, but its global impact is still not fully understood. The use of open data can lead to increased citizen engagement and civic tech innovation, particularly in smart city initiatives. However, the lack of statistical evidence on its measurable global impact remains a challenge. The history of open data dates back to the late 1950s, with the emergence of data wranglers who cleaned and reissued raw data for popular use. Today, many government agencies release hundreds of thousands of datasets every year, but only a handful make it into consumer experiences in any meaningful way. Leaders in the open data and smart city movements, such as New York City and Mexico City, have put location intelligence at the center of their initiatives, enriching their data with geospatial information and visualizing location data to discover hidden patterns and correlations. Real-time analysis of location data is also crucial for cities to respond quickly to citizens' needs. Ultimately, the time has come to deliver on the promise of open government data at a global level, making governments transparent, accountable, and responsive to citizens.

When evaluating new real estate investment opportunities, the importance of doing thorough research cannot be overstated, as location-based data plays a crucial role in understanding the value of a property and its potential for growth. By utilizing commercial demographic and transit data, investors can gain valuable insights into an area's accessibility, desirability, and long-term potential, allowing them to make informed decisions that provide the most value. This can be achieved through various methods, including visualizing local public and alternative transit options, using taxi pickup/dropoff data to identify emerging hotspots, exploring social data to gauge neighborhood popularity, enhancing visualization with demographic data, and unlocking the full power of location intelligence by combining these factors. By leveraging location-based data, investors can enhance their real estate investment strategy and make more informed decisions.

Chicago has implemented an initiative called the Array of Things (AoT) to collect data on its environment, infrastructure, and activity using sensor-based technologies. This hyper-local open data is being analyzed by researchers and city officials to study critical challenges such as flood prevention, traffic safety, air quality, and availability of civic services. The project partners with various organizations, including the University of Chicago, Argonne National Laboratory, AT&T, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and is backed by a $3.1 million grant from the National Science Foundation. A projected 500 sensors will be installed along Chicago streets by the end of 2018, providing an urban-scale testing ground for smart city technologies such as new communications or information systems. The data collected through AoT aims to make cities more livable and lead to innovation in public services, with the goal of making Chicago a leader in smart city innovation.

CARTO Traffico is a crowdsourced GPS data traffic management solution that enables cities and local governments to address urban mobility challenges by integrating real-time and historical data from various sources, including Waze's open data platform. The solution provides insights into traffic patterns, allowing cities to identify areas of congestion, optimize infrastructure projects, and provide transparency to citizens about the impact of these initiatives. By partnering with the Waze Connected Citizens Program, CARTO Traffico harnesses the power of location-based data from millions of drivers worldwide, providing a unique opportunity for cities to confront traffic-related issues with real-time anonymous location data. The solution is designed to empower urban planners and city operations managers to make data-driven decisions, reducing congestion and improving living conditions in cities across the globe.

Insurance companies are utilizing location intelligence to prepare for natural disasters by leveraging geospatial data to reduce exposure to risk, offer better service, and create diverse policy options that meet the needs of their customers. Embracing Location Intelligence can help insurers stay informed during disaster events, adapt quickly, and track storms' impact on policyholders. Insurance companies are also using spatial analytics to identify outliers in claims and investigate fraudulent cases, helping them focus efforts on customers who require assistance. To provide fair and accurate policy pricing, insurers are leveraging contemporary Location Intelligence tools that synthesize multiple data sets and provide deeper insights. By crowd-sourcing data and building a community of policyholders, insurers can improve claims management, ease the burden on adjusters, and better connect with their customers while maintaining competitive advantage.

Boost Telecom Analysis with FCC Data is now available on CARTO, providing comprehensive insights into broadband and mobile availability, upload/download speeds, providers, technology types, and more. This data includes the entire U.S., covering aspects of network planning & deployment to geomarketing, and can be accessed for free through a CARTO account. The subscription process is entirely cloud-native, allowing seamless access and analysis through the CARTO Workspace and cloud data warehouse. The FCC data is authoritative and extensive, making it an ideal resource for scaling telecom analytics. It can be used for various applications such as network planning optimization, competitive analysis, market expansion, customer segmentation, and more, offering a range of benefits for organizations in the telecom industry.

Raster analytics has arrived on the cloud, making it possible to manage large raster datasets faster and easier. CARTO and Snowflake have developed tools to store and manage rasters as tables, allowing for efficient storage and querying of big data. This is achieved through a partitioned format called Quadbin grid, which enables highly performant storage of big data. Additionally, CARTO provides user-defined functions that allow users to perform complex spatial analyses directly within Snowflake. The CARTO Data Loader also optimizes raster data for cloud storage, improving efficiency and speed. By combining raster and vector data, users can create more complete spatial analyses, and by utilizing these tools, they can scale up their analysis capabilities.