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.

For retailers, there is nothing more important than a clear, data-driven picture of store health. Whether you are a C-level executive looking at the big picture to identify macro-level trends, a corporate analyst investigating the complex identifiers of store success within a particular region, or a store manager making sure that your location is missing no opportunity to boost sales, site monitoring should be a top-to-bottom organizational priority.

The logistics industry is under increasing pressure thanks to rising costs, a shrinking labor force, and unrealistic customer expectations for priority deliveries. Even Amazon is not immune to these changes. Between 2015 and 2017 the ecommerce retailer’s shipping costs skyrocketed from $11.5 billion to $21.7 billion.

In the age of Amazon, differentiation on quality and service isn’t enough for retailers looking to not only survive but thrive. In order to compete in a narrowing retail landscape, retailers need to start competing with Amazon and other ecommerce giants on convenience as well.

On Friday, October 12th in CARTO’s Brooklyn office we will be hosting our Spatial Data Science Conference 2018. We are partnering again with the University of Chicago’s Center for Spatial Data Science to organize an exciting day of keynote addresses and lightning talks from experts and practitioners working with spatial data to solve real world problems.

The story usually goes that brick-and-mortar retail chains were too slow in adapting to changing omnichannel landscape and have struggled to compete with e-commerce retailers.