For August’s Map of the Month, we are happy to feature Housing and Spatial Information Specialist Dan Cookson’s recent map of the 1.5 million new homes built in England over the last decade.

We don’t yet know where it will end up, but Amazon HQ2 is going to vastly change the physical, societal, and economic landscape of the chosen site. For the candidate cities, Amazon itself, and other local economic interests, the impact of HQ2 will be significant. But what insights from Amazon’s impact on the city of Seattle, Washington can municipal leaders and other local officials consider to anticipate changes if their city is selected by the e-commerce giant?

Since GPS devices first appeared in cars in 1995, routing technology has been guiding us from Point A to Point B. In addition to its utility at the individual level, this now-ubiquitous technology can provide insights on wider human mobility when collected and aggregated. But how can we use these new derivative data streams in conjunction with spatial data science methodologies to help understand the health of our road networks, make them safer, and more efficient?

Sales territory management is a balancing act. Maintaining equity between salespeople, maximizing profitability, and minimizing costs are important and interconnected factors. There is no one-size-fits-all solution, and if the balance is off, sales management is likely to leave someone within their organization unhappy or leave money on the table.

In a previous post we introduced CARTO VL (beta), a new Javascript library for making vector-based, client-side visualizations. This new offering marks a significant advancement of in-browser functionality for Location Intelligence applications powered by CARTO.

Rising eCommerce changed the retail game and continues to grow, with global online sales hitting $2.3 Trillion in 2017. With estimates that that figure will reach over $4 Trillion by 2021, many experts have previously asserted that offline retail is entering its twilight years.

Advances made possible thanks to location data continue transforming business practices and processes when it comes to site planning. And now with insights from new data streams it is even possible to determine what sites are most likely to increase sales for seasonal, temporary, and mobile businesses.

Whether due to natural disaster, climate change, violent conflict, persecution, or human rights violations, the displacement of people from their homes is reaching record highs. According to the UNHCR, 65.6 Million people were displaced from their homes in the last year. If the displaced population were a country, it would be the 22nd most populous in the world, falling between Great Britain and France. Of the displaced population, 22.5 Million are refugees, displaced not only from their homes, but from their countries as well.

U.S. Census data and boundaries are used in a lot of different projects, but sometimes we’ve encountered some unexpected, and, frankly, odd results from forays into census data. So we wanted to share some tips learned while making sense of these census oddities so you can avoid these common pitfalls!

The unprecedented growth in Americans aged 65 and over is driving demand in the senior housing subsector. The Census Bureau expects the U.S. senior population to increase by 60 percent between 2016 and 2040, and preparing for this unprecedented population growth presents challenges for deciding when, where, and what type of medical facilities to open.