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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Just because your marketing strategy has a location component doesn’t mean that it’s Location Intelligent. With all of the data now available, organizations can understand precisely where their customers are, how they move about, and even where they spend their money — a wealth of information that allows geomarketers to create hyperlocal, customized, and competitive campaigns with a broad range of KPIs, especially if they keep the following five priorities in mind.

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.

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.

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.

The mission of the City Health Dashboard, a program created in a partnership between NYU Langone Health, and NYU’s Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service, is to “Equip cities with a one-stop resource for comprehensive, reliable data to help them build healthier and more equitable communities.”

The future of location intelligence relies on systems capable of analyzing and visualizing vast amounts of data that respond quickly to user interactions and queries. Vector-based, client-side technology provides this foundation.

With McKinsey estimating that the Internet of Things (IoT) has the potential to make an economic impact of $3.9 trillion to $11.1 trillion a year by 2025, IoT has evolved from a buzzword to a reality that businesses can’t afford to ignore.

IoT—or the linking of the physical world with the digital one—is fundamentally concerned with issues related to Location Intelligence (from sensors monitoring traffic, to indoor mapping) so it’s no surprise that IoT will lead to major improvements and developments in the smart city, retail, and real estate industries.

Here are 3 location intelligence IoT trends to keep an eye on in 2018.

With significant buzz on social media and in the press and an uptick in industry analysis and research, Location Intelligence is more important and present than ever. Still, there remains only one conference devoted to all things LI. CARTO Locations Madrid, the 2nd annual Location Intelligence Summit, brought together attendees from all over the globe, and next week Locations comes to New York.

One of several exciting announcements coming out of CARTO Locations Madrid was the launch of Airship, CARTO’s new front-end library for Location Intelligence apps. Airship, along with CARTO.js 4.0 and the new Developer Center, is a part of CARTO’s strategy to empower developers with the tools to build their own custom Location Intelligence applications and solutions to answer today’s varied and complex business questions.

Established in 2011 at the High-Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Busan, South Korea, The Global Partnership for Effective Development Co-operation is a project lead by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in concert with 161 countries, 56 international organisations, and additional partners across the public and private sectors.

Modern connectivity has produced a new way of understanding spatial relations, often transcending administrative boundaries in favor of functional geographies. And while our planet’s political borders are far from obsolete, the growing sense of “connectography”, what author Parag Khanna defines as the geographical layer of interconnectedness, alongside a rising environmental consciousness has spurred public/private partnerships that collaborate on the projects fighting to protect the Earth, its natural resources, and fragile ecosystems.

Location Intelligence is a young field, forming at the intersection of new technologies and existing branches of knowledge. Twitter, a global sounding board for experts, is a natural fit for this growing sector and the perfect place to bring together collective expertise for greater development and collaboration.

Understanding the patterns and trends in the everyday actions of citizens, workers, or consumers is key to answering complex business questions. 90% of smartphone users keep their mobile device within reach 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. This makes mobile data a potent tool for analyzing trends and solving today’s greatest challenges.

When seeking a deeper understanding of behavioral patterns and trends among customers, citizens, and cities, mobile data is a powerful tool.

Calling the Pi Project ambitious is an understatement.

On Friday, February 9th, the 2018 Winter Olympic Games kicked off in Pyeongchang, South Korea. Featuring athletes from 92 countries around the world, this Winter Games provided myriad international headlines ranging from the geopolitically important (such as the North and South Korean teams marching as one during the opening ceremony) to the downright silly (chefs for team Norway ordering 15,000 eggs due to a typo).

With over 100,000 attendees, the Mobile World Congress is the world’s largest exhibition for the mobile industry, and the team at CARTO is excited to be joining the festivities for the fifth straight year.

As a part of our Map of the Month series, we dive into a recent Twitter project and see how they use maps to engage with the Twitter community. On January 8th, CJ Marple, a 3rd grade teacher at Osage City Elementary School in Kansas began a lesson exploring the speed and distance that information can travel using social media. Marple, an active twitter user, worked with his students to compose a tweet, with the intention of mapping the social media engagement as the message spread. It isn’t hard to imagine CJ and his students’ surprise as the tweet began to pick up steam, go viral, and circle the globe.

Much of the data gathered by businesses, cities, and other organizations today contains at least one location component. This is essentially the basis for the existence of the field of Location Intelligence. We believe that innovators in all sectors; private, public, education, nonprofit, etc, should be empowered to draw insights and inform their decision making based on their location data.

2017 was an eventful year, shaped by a confluence of environmental, social and political moments that impacted people across the globe. Though global in their scope and impact, many of these events were local, impacting various locations in different ways. To ring in the new year, we at CARTO wanted to look back and showcase some of the maps that tell the story of 2017.

Insurance providers must move quickly to take advantage of the location data available to them. Confronted with a world with more extreme weather than ever before, Location Intelligence is helping insurers prepare their organizations and policyholders for the inevitable increase in natural disasters and extreme weather events.

When evaluating new real estate investment opportunities to grow your portfolio or doing your due diligence on an existing investment, the importance of doing your homework cannot be overstated.

As our understanding of Location Intelligence and its applications across the public and private sector grows, thematic maps are becoming a more critical part of any professional’s toolkit.