Every Tuesday morning we deliver the CARTO 5 — our weekly roundup of news, blog posts, maps, and other interesting odds-and-ends from, and relating to, the Location Intelligence space — to inboxes around the globe. Seeing what resonates with readers provides a unique insight into the minds of the LI community writ large, a motley collection of Cartographers and Data Scientists, Corporate Executives and Open Source Evangelists, and many more.

Amid growing demand for quick service restaurant (QSR) properties, private and 1031 investors have started supplementing QSR evaluation metrics, like past sales performance, with new measures related to past site planning decisions to gain competitive edge.

McKinsey estimates that in-store sales will still make up 75% to 85% of all retail sales in 2025. For online-native retailers eyeing growth and expansion, this makes an omnichannel retail strategy critical.

One year ago today, we announced the launch of CARTOframes, a Python package for interacting with CARTO built specifically for data scientists. To celebrate, I sat down for a Fireside Chat with CARTOframes creator and member of our data science team, Andy Eschbacher, and Senior Customer Support Manager Jeff Ferzoco.

When building new software applications, developers wrestle with doubts on whether their design decisions will deliver users the best possible experience. From interface layout to control and display element selection, developers must decide on a range of issues which directly impact the functionality of their apps. At CARTO we’re fortunate enough to work with a fantastic Design team who provides feedback on our projects, but most customers and partners don’t sit across from designers who can help them with these decisions.

To say that Amazon’s HQ2 decision proved divisive would be an understatement. Whether Jeff Bezos selected the neighborhoods of Crystal City in Arlington, Virginia and Long Island City, in Queens, New York because of their proximity to the political and economic centers of the U.S., or because he owns homes in each area, or both, many are criticizing the e-commerce giant for its year-long site planning contest where local officials in 236 U.S. cities dedicated limited resources on proposals to attract Amazon that could have been better spent.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In today’s competitive market, established grocers are launching or acquiring discount brands to supplement revenue from other brand holdings.

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.

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.

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.”

It’s no secret that the retail and real estate industries have been disrupted over the past decade. Traditional Retailers are learning to co-exist with ecommerce giants and satisfy the demands of the “I want it now” consumer, while real estate companies are witnessing a paradigm shift in the way both individuals and organizations use, rent and buy property in an era of flexible workspace and short-term leases.

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.

We’re one week out from the start of CARTO Locations Madrid!

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.

Whether you’re a data scientist, developer, analyst, spatial professional, or a geospatial enthusiast, there’s a Location Intelligence conference that’s right for you!

U.S. health inequity studies tend to focus on accessibility barriers caused by the industry’s fee-for-service model, but physicians, insurers, and public health officials have recently turned their attention to questions related to pharmacy accessibility. “There is substantial variation in the availability of pharmacies across the country,” explains Dr. Dima Qato. In a 2017 publication, Dr. Qato and her research team explored the varying degrees of pharmacy accessibility using 2015 data. While 90% of Americans filled more than 4 billion prescription orders (12.7 per capita) at community pharmacies located within 2-miles from their homes, when this national-level data is disaggregated and studied at the county level issues pertaining to accessibility appear to be more complicated. Additional findings included:

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.

Changing consumer habits are rocking the boat for the Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) industry. In developed markets, including the United States and Great Britain, limited population growth and wage stagnation have diminished revenue opportunities for CPG. In response, Strategy& reports, CGP brands have started splitting consumers into two key groups:

The proliferation of analytics is the result of attempts to manage, calculate, and determine the best course of action based on partial and/or incomplete data. And while another type of data analytics may seem unnecessary, Alex D. Singleton, Seth E. Spielman, and David C. Folch have put forth an interdisciplinary analytics for better understanding our interconnected cities in their new book, Urban Analytics.

As nations, NGOs, and development organizations from around the world strive to achieve the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, they need to be data-driven and interconnected. In order for sustainable development to be successful, open source technologies, open data, and collaboration are critical. Location Intelligence, the next evolution of GIS, is a key component in the open technological ecosystem necessary for attaining the SDGs.

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).

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.

Today we are excited to announce a new partnership with Mapbox that better integrates each company’s services with one another. For some time customers have requested this type of integration, and while it has been possible to use both services together we wanted to make this process much easier.

Vector tiles are the building blocks for maps and location applications that need to quickly create smooth interactive experiences. When analyzing and visualizing a lot of spatial data, a flexible platform is needed to process information and deploy these vector tiles quickly.

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.

Location Intelligence (LI) is not so quietly becoming a core part of most enterprise business’ strategies. In a survey of 220 data analysts, executives, and scientists, 85% believed that location intelligence would be “very” or “extremely” important to their organization’s success over the next 3 years, with 84% planning on investing in LI technology.

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.

Data storytelling is the process of translating and presenting data analysis as meaningful information. Whether your data story promotes environmental conservation or a change in your organization’s go-to-market strategies, the goal for data storytellers remains the same: tell a story that engages audiences and encourages action.

Developers need open-source tools to be able to create applications that are both visually stunning and highly functional. CARTO and the Location Intelligence community have long supported the open-source community, contributing to the development of a modern geospatial tech stack that allows all companies to take advantage of their location data.

As wildfires continue to rage in Ventura and LA County, residents may be wondering what addresses are most affected. This map, created by Mamata Akella (this morning!), shows real-time data of the perimeter of the wildfires as well as the streets most impacted.

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.

The demand for data scientists to understand and use geospatial analysis in their process has led to new trends and innovations in the data science field.

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.

Supply chains are a critical, and often unnoticed, part of our everyday lives. Almost everything that we purchase in a store comes to us as a part of a supply chain and managing these networks is a complex and ever evolving task.

Data science is a rapidly growing career path and leaders across all industries, fields, and governments are putting their best minds to the task of harnessing the power of location data.

The wildfires ravaging northern California this month are among the most destructive in the state’s history. Since the beginning of October, wildfires across northern California counties including Napa, Sonoma, Mendocino, and Butte have to date burned over 170,000 acres of land, destroyed 3,500 structures, forced the evacuation of 200,000 people, and caused 31 deaths.

Consultants face a growing demand to present solutions to clients that go beyond a powerpoint presentation or static PDF report.

Transit systems form a lifeline connecting residents and visitors to various locations across a city, and when service is disrupted the effects are felt far and wide. This past summer, for instance, Metro de Madrid scheduled maintenance repairs along the Line 5 which suspended commuter service. Full service was restored on September 3, 2017, but what impact did the Line 5’s 62 day shutdown have upon the city of Madrid?

More and more local government agencies are turning to open data and Location Intelligence to optimize current services while also preparing more sustainable solutions in light of anticipated obstacles stemming from increased urban migration, climate change, and an aging population.

Administrative municipal boundaries, such as districts and neighborhoods, are often used to describe the behavior of citizens that live within cities. However, in most countries, people interact within cities without constraining their activity to district or zip code boundary constraints.

According to Glassdoor, data scientist is the #1 job in the United States based on number of job openings, salary, and overall job satisfaction.

Successfully managing sales territories is not an easy task, but the consequences of doing it poorly are severe: higher overhead (the average business trip costs $2,600), lower employee retention, decreased productivity, and piecemeal, inconsistent customer service.

Editor’s Note: This post was published using maps with real-time data during Hurricane Irma in September, 2017. As those maps no longer display any data, we’ve included a static image at the top of this post that gives you a sense of the types of maps we originally created for this post.

For the past week, we’ve all seen the spaghetti models and cones of uncertainty that aim to predict the path of Hurricane Irma, already the most powerful storm ever to form in the Atlantic.

In our rapidly evolving online world, digital marketers constantly have to find new ways to make sure their campaigns are reaching the right people with the right message.

We’ve all seen the controversial Keystone XL Pipeline in the news, and every few months, we hear of a catastrophic oil spill.

Geomarketing has seen quick adoption in consumer-focused transactional industries like retail, helping new up-and-coming brands grow rapidly and compete with big box stores.

What do Dr. John Snow, the 19th century English physician, and Jon Snow, the King of the North in Game of Thrones have in common?

FOSS4G, the annual International Conference for Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial, was held last week in Boston, Massachusetts. FOSS4G is an important conference for the Geospatial community, and one that CARTO has supported for the last several years.

You may have heard, a total eclipse of the sun is on the way to 12 states in the United States on August 21, spanning from the west coast of Oregon to the east coast of South Carolina. While we’ll be singing Bonnie Tyler from our desks in Brooklyn, NY...

Seattle Poetic Grid, our Map of the Month selection for August 2017, is an interdisciplinary project that maps the sounds of community within a smart city.

Last week, over 200 geospatial experts from 150 member states convened at the United Nations to discuss how spatial data and technology are shaping the future of sustainable development in line with the United Nation’s 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Today’s online digital “vanity metrics” are proving a challenge for the biggest Out-of-Home (OOH) companies. When the latest viral video ad gets 2 millions daily views, it’s deemed an overwhelming success; but when the location of a billboard ad claims 2 million in footfall, it’s defined as “prime real estate.”

Chew on this for a moment. Take out your smart device, unlock your screen, and scroll through your apps. How many food specific applications are installed? From Seamless to UberEats to Resy, companies are cropping up around the world to serve shoppers and potential customers instantly, efficiently, and directly.

Sales and marketing directors all ask the same question: “How do I get my products or services in front of the right people at the right time?”

Online retailers have become experts in tailoring consumer experiences, building stronger relationships with customers, and launching targeted ad campaigns by collecting data.

A central component of territory management is sales territory design. Gartner has found a 73 percent increase in business implementation of territory management software since 2012, a figure likely to increase as more and more companies adopt data-driven strategies.

Communities are incredibly difficult to map and most research packs them into isolated groups.

The opportunity for New York City’s bus system has never been greater. As its sibling system, the subway, enters a declared state of emergency, the NYC bus system could help solve the city’s transit woes.

Cartography is as much art as it is science. A map can use the best data and most sophisticated analyses but is ineffective if the reader can’t understand the story behind it. However, unless you’re Leonardo da Vinci, being both an artist and a scientist doesn’t come naturally, so we’ve found two maps that demonstrate how colors, labels, boundaries, and symbols can help you create a powerful map.

Geoawesomeness, a website with a self-proclaimed focus on all things geospatial, celebrated its sixth anniversary last month. From posts on recently declassified CIA maps, to tips on geomarketing, to drones and remote sensors, Editor-in-Chief Aleks Buczowski and Managing Editor Muthukumar Kumar have covered a wide range of topics together.

As the importance of location data continues to grow so do the ways you can visualize this information. We’ve scoured the web in search of data visualizations showing the value of location data in its many varieties, and have compiled this mega list to bring you the very best examples. The 80 entries below surprised us, taught us, inspired us, and drastically changed the way we understand location data.

Each year, New York City celebrates Pride Month with a large procession down 5th Avenue, passing by the Stonewall Inn, the site of a police raid in 1969 that launched the gay liberation movement.

If Amazon’s planned $14 billion acquisition of Whole Foods goes through, it could radically change the grocery industry. Many news outlets have speculated why Amazon might be interested in Whole Foods, from solving grocery home delivery to getting a part of the $675 billion per year grocery business in the...

You’ve probably seen the headline a dozen times: “[big box store] closes [large number] of Stores Nationwide.”

While early cartographers didn’t use the term “location intelligence,” they were keenly aware that their maps had an intended purpose.

Nonprofits and humanitarian relief agencies are using location data to tackle some of the most challenging problems in the world today: from housing discrimination, to climate change, to disease prevention.

Lately location data has received a lot of press and attention – and rightly so. Organizations that utilize location data have shown it to be effective in enhancing marketing efficiency, reducing risk, improving medical research, and facilitating urban planning. Location data combines information from diverse sources in new ways to...

For two days, more than 250 leaders in Location Intelligence gathered at CARTO Locations in Madrid to share and learn new ways businesses are turning location data into outcomes.

Most organizations are replete with data and data sources. What to do with that data for better business outcomes is not simply a question of database management, but one of strategy, enrichment, visualization, analysis, and taking action.

Open data is justifying all its hype by making local governance easier, more accessible, and transparent for the daily lives of small town and big city residents alike.

Location intelligence (LI) is becoming increasingly vital to a wide variety of industries, but it can still be hard to find conferences and events where you can get smart on this growing sector.

Earth Day, an annual event rallying support for environmental protection, will take place this Saturday, and marks the event’s forty-seventh anniversary. A growing environmentally-conscious consumerism among millennials has helped support green initiatives as more and more businesses “go green.”

As massive amounts of data are stockpiled in databases and CRM platforms, executives are turning to data analysts to make sense of it all. But why are so many businesses still struggling to turn location data into profitable outcomes?

The debut of Apple’s iPhone in 2007 ushered in a location data revolution. The exponential rise in mobile devices, crowdsourcing applications, and smart gadgets connected within the Internet of Things over the last decade, however, has generated an unprecedented amount of location data leading to what some are calling Location Data 2.0.

On April 3, 2017, the U. S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) will begin accepting 2018 applications for H-1B Visas. The H-1B program permits U.S. employers to temporarily hire foreign workers with specialized skills each year. In January, however, members of the House of Representatives introduced H.R.670: High-Skilled Integrity and Fairness Act of 2017, a bill proposing significant changes to the current H-1B application process.

Data-tracking devices, from wearables to time and task management applications, have become a quotidian and normalized aspect of most Western societies. From Fitbits to sleep trackers – a question like, “How many steps have you taken today?” – is regularly asked by employers and friends over drinks at Friday happy hour.

In honor of New York City’s Open Data Week 2017 we’ve compiled a resource featuring 40 smart, data-driven projects reminding us of open data’s value.

In the age of global technopolis, open government data reigns. In 2016, 70 countries participated in the Open Government Partnership, a big increase from just 7 in 2011, and 52 countries hosted their own open data portals.

When California went on record as experiencing one of the most exceptional droughts in history, even “untouchable” movie stars were fined for watering their lawns.

After the inauguration of President Trump, and the mobilization of millions of people around the world to protest his presidency, it seems timely to examine the data behind the results of the U.S. Presidential Election. Citizens were fueled and deflated by pollster data, with many believing random data from divergent...

There is no denying the increased potential of efficient, smart cities through the collaborative efforts of municipal governments, citizens, universities, and innovative businesses. Just last year, President Barack Obama’s Administration announced a new Smart Cities Initiative to invest over $160 million in research, at home and abroad, to help cities...

Eighty percent of a business’s data contains a location component that is often overlooked. However, this trend is starting to change thanks to professionals using Qlik Sense to reimagine methods of data analysis with location intelligence.

At CARTO we take pride in empowering the next generation of researchers and data-lovers to create projects that push the boundaries of how we understand our world. Recently, we shared our technology with Hannan Abid and Julian Moulton, two students transcribing, cleaning, and digitizing data at the American Museum of...

San Francisco has long been at the forefront of the discussion about the impact gentrification and the changing economic and demographic landscapes have on cities and the people who live there. CARTO has partnered with San Fransisco-based Anti-Eviction Mapping Project in order to analyze the data trends in rapid gentrification...

We’re thrilled to announce that the Data Observatory is welcoming Mexico into the fold with an impressive array of demographic data from the Mexican Census. This new data is specific to the block level in metropolitan areas!

CARTO has an extensive history with working alongside non-profits and non-governmental organizations to provide insights to better serve humanity and the world. Recently, several NGOs and different environmental organizations like FishSpektrum, a big data project focused on improving knowledge on fishery activity around the world, have been working hard to...

The Zika virus has been around for over 50 years but it wasn’t until this year that the World Health Organization declared it a Public Health Emergency of International Concern, as the virus continues to spread to new areas.

In our previous blog post we introduced Gravity Models, a useful function that allows businesses and organizations to choose the location of their next store or mall. This time, we are going to apply Huff’s Law to populated areas to study their attraction based on population as an extension to...

As part of our initiative to provide strategic solutions for business, CARTO is thrilled to announce Gravity Models—a function that users can add to their analysis–that predicts the amount of people who will come to your location based on the presence of competing locations.

Note: This post has been written in collaboration with Antonio F. Rodríguez Pascual, Deputy Assistant Director of the Spanish Centre for Geographical Information. National Mapping Agencies are organizations with lots of data to offer to citizens and organizations like thematic data but also Reference Data (data used to georeference other...

As part of our Data Observatory rollout, CARTO is excited to announce that we are maintaining shoreline clipped versions of the USA boundaries provided by U.S. Census TIGER (Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing). TIGER publishes shapefiles of some of the most important boundaries in the U.S., including U.S. states,...

Earlier this week we released the Data Observatory. We built the Data Observatory because we wanted easier to find and easier to use geospatial data. More than that, we wanted to put in place the foundation for some things we have in store for the future (more on that in my next blog post). We are all a bunch of map and data nerds, so this is a project that really came from our hearts. While the Data Observatory is far from complete, we built it so it could expand rapidly into new areas of data, the first release is enough to have us tearing up a bit. We think it has the power to change the way you analyze location data and potentially the way you think about maps entirely.

As you might have already heard, the Data Observatory just launched to help provide CartoDB users with a universe of data. One of the reasons we built the Data Observatory is because getting the third-party data you need is oftentimes the hardest part of analyzing your own data. Data wrangling...

Lately, there has been a lot happening at CARTO related to the visual exploration of location data. We’ve been researching, for quite a while, new ideas for visualizing thematic information on the web. Apart from color, we might have something to share with you soon, we are investing time experimenting...

We are very excited to share details on our upcoming trip to Tokyo, organized together with OSGeo Japan and Pacific Spatial Solutions. Javier de la Torre and Jaime de Mora will be there for a week full of events and meetings.

As we announced last week, today is the first day of Big Data week at CartoDB! How can we begin to better understand and explain what big data is? Everyday we read in newspapers and social media the words ‘big data’ as it applies to businesses and systems of analysis...

This is our third post of CartoDB’s mobile blog series. If you’ve missed any of our previous posts you can view them here and here. In this edition, we’ll continue to build on the information from the earlier posts and present new and compelling details on how you can consume...

Planning where to strategically go next can be a daunting task. There are numerous factors to consider, like time. At major festivals, like SXSW, planning how long it takes to move from place to place doesn’t have to be so intimidating anymore. Time and Distance Isolines (also called isochrones), a...

Airbnb has become a lightning rod for controversy regarding the so-called sharing economy. In tight housing markets – particularly New York City and San Francisco, many have claimed that Airbnb contributes to the displacement of longtime, poorer residents. These reports are alarming, but no one has tried to map a...

One of the most common reasons people make maps using CartoDB is to try and explore the patterns in their data in order to make better decisions or to communicate interesting ideas. This exploratory approach to location intelligence can be difficult, but armed with the right analytical workflows and cartographic...

You might have seen the blog post we produced a little while ago looking at the L train closure and the possible impact that might have on L commuters to manhattan. One of the most visually striking elements of that post were the maps where we showed walking routes for...

At CartoDB we do our very best to spread the word on how anyone around the globe can leverage data and visualizations to make better, faster decisions. When great mappers make and discover insights through location intelligence we like to reward them. We are proud of our carefully selected and...

As more governments and businesses are adopting proactive open data policies and programs, the infrastructure of data publishing is becoming increasingly important. The time-honored tradition of publishing file-based machine-readable data on the web is still alive and well, but live, api-accessible databases can help when publishing data that is updated...

Location intelligence is an often heard term, but what it means and how it can benefit businesses, institutions and individuals may not be immediately obvious. Location intelligence is more than analysis of geospatial information or geographic information systems alone, it is the capability to visualize spatial data to identify and...

Welcome, CartoDB community, to Deep Insights—CartoDB’s solution to make the invisible visible, and allow you to discover unseen correlations and patterns at an unprecedented scale.

We absolutely love client success stories that make use of big data and provide great insights for customers all over the world. In this case, the insights are for one of the fastest growing global fields, real estate.

Late last year, the second season of the podcast Serial began. The very popular first season in 2014 had re-investigated an old case of murder in Baltimore. It gripped audiences with its reporting and was a thrilling listen every week.

Last night the Carolina Panthers were smothered by the Denver Broncos in what ended in a two-touchdown lead game. How did the U.S. react? What did they think about that last call on possession? Will we ever come to a consensus on whether Beyonce stumbled during her performance?

Did this past weekend’s East Coast blizzard leave you with the feeling of wishing you could pinpoint where you built that wicked igloo during Snowstorm Jonas?

For two days, CartoDB will be at the Big Data Innovation - Las Vegas Summit! From January 28-29, we will participate in world-class presentations, panels, discussions, and networking.

With less than a month away before the first U.S. presidential primaries, all eyes are on the headlines for the latest jabs by Trump, Hillary, and the gang. Just how do journalists get the spin on the topics and trends this election season?

Our very concept of place is shifting as digital information layers and enriches the physical world. The streams of digital data generated by our daily lives tell stories and offer rich context and insights. Location intelligence offers views into our environment that has become encoded with new meaning and messages....

What are smart cities? A catchy phrase or a real movement for change, or something in-between? It is true that the challenges facing cities are real: aging infrastructure, rapid development, climate change, and populations growing at unprecedented rates. To keep pace, future cities must be more agile and inclusive. City...

This past Tuesday marked the 111th anniversary of the New York City Subway, an iconic transport system which to-date has the most active stations of any underground system in the world. Subways operate in over 55 countries globally, throughout a growing collection of 150-some cities; and the art of mapping...

Rent and real estate conditions are fascinating subjects for maps. While they may be the maps that haunt us when in moving-in/out mode, they are likewise the ones that help us mostly clearly comprehend the human, economic, and social landscape of our surroundings. Read on to continue in our series...

As summer turns to fall, BBQ and lemonade gives way to packed lunches and cafeteria delights. But back-to-school stays cool with CartoDB’s Education Whitepaper. Ready to elevate your classroom lectures and group projects, CartoDB’s Education Whitepaper provides solutions for map-based data visualization, analysis, and storytelling - with no coding skills...

One of the biggest challenges of the 2008 global financial crisis was the inability for financial institutions to handle risk management in a rapidly changing demographic. For businesses to progress post-crisis, re-imagining business intelligence and bringing their companies up-to-date with new technology became an imperative. CartoDB’s financial risk analysis has...

As humans, our sense of smell, or olfaction, often triggers the recollection of memorable experiences and the reflexive tuning of our taste buds. How we rectify these triggers with our physical experience informs our response to navigation and often our reaction/attraction to others, areas, and items in our world. In...

When we talk about maps in our present, we often forget the intrepid legacy of mapmaking in our past. Some subtle reminders of the struggles behind our geographic sensitivities still hold strong; names like “Mercator” and “Coronelli” echo in our projections and account plans at CartoDB, but rarely do contemporary...

Property values are a persistent obsession for New Yorkers, as are the arbitrary constraints to dwelling well (dwelling? yes). Between navigating the rental quagmire of online listings to toggling the various Trulia, StreetEasy, and Zillow helper services, you can tumble down a rabbit hole of the worst options imaginable (or...

We’ve got a theory that mapping the global impact of data and information helps create better, more socially aware, and global citizens.

Guest post by Laura Allen When I pitched my article Keeping up with the Carnivores for JSTOR Daily on the encroachment of predators into urban America, I knew that one of my favorite carnivores, fishers, were perfect for the story. Fishers are slinky members of the weasel family that have...

In the wake of World Water Day (water puns for the win!), we’re plotting this Map of the Week using CartoDB + OdysseyJS to characterize rivers, and chapterize learning about location via Mexico’s Mississippi: Rios Lerma y Santiago. Read on for more about this rad approach to our understanding of...

Serving up dynamic web maps that render live and changing data can be challenging enough, but what about when those maps are also under extreme load as millions of users access them? With our partner AppGeo we discuss how we solved that problem, for one of their customers, and for all our users, all the time.

When Sade sang in ‘Smooth Operator’ – “Coast to coast, LA to Chicago” – she obviously hadn’t consulted a map. For starters, L.A. - Los Angeles (not to be confused by the abbreviation of Louisiana, a southern U.S. state) is on the coast but what about Chicago? Only if you...

CartoDB is built on top of PostgreSQL and PostGIS for making maps on the web fun and easy. Firebase is an awesome platform for pushing and receiving updates, i.e., making realtime applications. There are a bunch of users out there who want to track objects on maps, but also want...

This past week, the NYTimes posted an extended piece on mapping county-level lynching data, a topic of interest to some of our academic users and in particularly, Michael Weaver. Michael is a Ph.D candidate in Political Science at Yale University, where he investigates the causes and consequences of ethnic violence....

In case you were trapped on a moutain, in a blizzard so thick you couldn’t see your hands in front of your face, and just got back to civilization this morning, let us say the Superbowl happened last night. The team from the East Coast beat the team from the...

As many know, CartoDB’s commitment to elevating efforts in conservation, climate change, and the environment has shaped our practice and given way to many exciting mapping projects such as the creative and impressive Carbon Calculator and the Global Forest Watch Map that allows users to monitor deforestation in real time.

On Tuesday evening, President Barack Obama delivered his final State of the Union Address. This year marks the first year that the State of the Union address was made available as full text for perusal and commentary prior to the speech. In the spirit of this openness, we’ve paired a...

Today we hear from a friend from our NYC community, Chris Henrick. Chris is a MFA Design & Technology graduate student at Parsons, The New School For Design. He is a long time user and an expert on CartoDB. We recently saw The Northwest Bushwick Community Map, a project he...

In exactly one year from today, the force will re-awaken with Star Wars: Episode VII. Until then, get caught up on humanity’s favorite space saga with this comprehenisive map of the Star Wars galaxy:

In the big, complex world of mapping data, it’s often easy to forget the significant impact that simple and elegant visualizations can have. For this reason, we are proud to announce our new map series Less Is More! Our new series brings together strikingly simple map designs that tell big,...

We all need an assist when we’re thinking big. At CartoDB, we’ve seen some of the most original user visualizations inspired by common data. So, we’re focused on growing public data offerings to help you make maps that tell more creative and comprehensive stories.

Welcomer Aurelia Moser (@auremoser) to our Map of the Week series. She is a developer for Knight Mozilla Open News in Brooklyn, NY. She has worked on projects for Ushahidi and Internews Kenya, building interactive visualizations to support data journalism and crisis mapping globally. Find her at algorhyth.ms, and listen...

RocketMill are a digital marketing agency working on behalf of Caring Homes, a leading UK care home provider. As businesses, they share similar values: they are people-centred, value transparency and are both innovative. This interactive data graphic is completely in line with these values. Krystian Szastok was the project leader...

We welcome Laura Kurtzberg, Data Intern at ecoLab, to our Map of the Week series. Kurtzberg work on the InfoAmazonia project along with other online undertakings. She cares about using Internet technology for humanitarian and environmental causes.

We welcome Pedro Cuhna to our Map of The Week series. He’s a developer currently working in Startup Institute as a freelancer. Check some of his work here. Cunha created an interactive map with Dmitry Pavluk, Anna Young, and Diego Torres Quintanilla to provide a baseline understanding of air pollution...

Welcome Kalev H. Leetaru, a fellow and adjunct faculty in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University in Washington DC. In this guest post Kalev talks about how he used CartoDB to create a map of global conflict that updates every morning.

Welcome Miles Grimshaw to our Map of the Week series. Miles has used Kimono Labs and CartoDB to visualize one year of his Citibike trips (the bike service in New York City). Here is the result.

We welcome Jeff Jenkins to our Map of the Week series. Jenkins is a cyclist, board gamer, and software engineer living in New York City. He decided to take NYC’s data on truck routes and overlayed it onto a map with bike lanes to prove that there is a need...

We welcome Timo Grossenbacher to our Map of The Week. He’s currently working as Interactive News Developer at the Swiss daily newspaper Tages-Anzeiger, based in Zurich.

Welcome Sarah Ryley to our Map of the Week series. Sarah is the data projects editor at the New York Daily News, which has the second-largest newspaper website in the United States. Crime reporting is the bread and butter of the Daily News, so Sarah has been focused on making...

We welcome Nacho Ormeño to our Map Of The Week series. Ormeño is a co-founder of Startupxplore, a global platform created to connect and promote the blooming startup community and its main actors. Startupxplore enables visitors to browse startups, investors, entrepreneurs, events, companies giving services… They started up us a startup map, so maps are an important part of their project. Learn how they have been integrating data maps in their web app using CartoDB.

Welcome our own Laura Guzman to our Map of the Week series. Guzman is a Technical Intern in our New York office, and she teamed up with sustainable clothing company Loomstate to build an Odyssey.js visualization of how Loomstate’s newest product is made.

Welcome Eric Brelsford to our Map of the Week series. Brelsford is a freelance programmer, mapmaker, and teacher. He spends much of his time working on 596 Acres and related sites in Brooklyn, NY.

Welcome Øyvind Bye Skille to our Map of the Week series. Øyvind works for NRK (the Norwegian Broadcasting Corp.), the public broadcaster of Norway which produces content for both radio, TV and digital. Almost 9 out of 10 Norwegians use content from the NRK every week (88% in 2013). All development and production of web content these days require it to work both on mobile devices and desktop computers.

Welcome Emma from Folk to Folk in this new installment of our Map of the Week. Folk to Folk is an independent documentary project exploring how the inclusive spirit of folk music helps build communities and creates accessible, participatory spaces across America today. We are happy to see how people are using CartoDB to create story-telling sites - and stay tuned because we’ll have news in this front soon! Meanwhile, enjoy the story of how Folk to Folk was made.

Physicians for Human Rights (@P4HR) is an independent organization that uses medicine and science to stop mass atrocities and severe human rights violations. They are supported by the expertise and passion of health professionals and concerned citizens alike. We welcome Elise Baker to tell us about how they have created this comprehensive map.

Chris Henrick is a CartoDB collaborator. We welcome him in this guest Map of the Week post to let him tell us about how he is using CartoDB mapping tool to solve the mapping needs of InsideSchools, with maps such as the Guide to pre-kindergarten

Welcome Andy Tow for this new Map of the Week. Andy is an adviser in the Argentinian Senate, and blogs relentlessly about elections and politics with a focus on quantitative information and analysis. In this map he shows extensive information about the private contributions in the 2013 primary legislative elections.

We welcome Dmitriy Skougarevskiy who is a doctoral candidate at The Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in this guest post to let him tell us about his pet project on the loopholes in the Law of the Sea, called donutholes.ch.