Six months after the beta release, the CARTO team is proud to announce the full, public launch of CARTO VL, our JavaScript library for vector-based visualization and analytics, enabling faster, smarter decision making with Location Intelligence applications.

Vision Zero, a popular initiative aiming to eliminate traffic fatalities and injuries, emphasizes the need for more traffic data analysis. In understanding past mobility and movement patterns, cities and municipalities can better predict and prevent future accidents. As increased urbanization drives the need for more of these studies, let’s take a look at working with location data streams to measure, monitor, and manage traffic and mobility safely.

More than 5 billion of the world’s 7.5 billion people own a cell phone. That ubiquitousness, coupled with their innate connectivity, makes mobile devices, and specifically the font of data generated by them, the world’s most powerful tool for understanding people.

Frustration with Facebook and Google’s online advertising “duopoly,” which accounted for 63% of all U.S. digital ad revenue in 2017, is leading digital marketers to search for alternative ad-tech solutions. What firms, agencies, and departments are looking for is an agnostic platform that can process different types of location data, and especially mobile data, in order to design, deploy, and determine performance of geomarketing campaigns.

First used in the late 1800’s, Isochrone Maps, which depict the transport times in every direction from a distinct point, have long been an important component in the business analyst’s toolbox. But with modern data streams and Location Intelligence, a deeper understanding of customer travel and activity can be had using catchment areas derived from mobility data.

For the modern city looking to improve its mobility infrastructure and assess traffic systems, modern, real-time data streams are a powerful tool. A now-ubiquitous navigation tool, Waze’s real-time traffic data can provide key insights to urban data scientists and planners.

Although the landscape has drastically transformed over the last decade, retail analytics have not kept pace which is causing some retailers to close the wrong store locations. McKinsey reports that many retailers rely on “four-wall economics” to assess store performance when they should be using consumer behavior insights extracted from location data with spatial analysis. And where McKinsey finds geospatial analytics most valuable is in “helping retailers make better decisions about expanding or contracting their store network.”

Vodafone, one of the world’s leading telcos, will provide a series of pioneering solutions to optimize the management of MTV Music Week Bizkaia through advanced location analytics and IoT technology.

Founded in 1974, the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development is a coalition of community groups that aims to ensure affordable and equitable housing and neighborhoods for all New Yorkers. Created using CARTO.js and pulling in open data from multiple sources, they hope the latest version of their Displacement Alert Map (DAP Map) will equip organizers, decision makers, and others with a tool to visualize, understand, and hopefully take action to fight housing displacement.

When Amazon announced its acquisition of Whole Foods for $13.1 billion dollars last year analysts speculated on what impact the “Amazon Effect” would have on grocery retail. However, Bloomberg reports that the merger’s biggest impact was in the number of mergers and partnerships among competitors reacting to the news. The first half of 2018 saw record breaking merger and acquisition activity with U.S. based deals valued at an astounding $1.03 trillion dollars.