How Skyhook Wireless use CARTO's Location Intelligence Platform

Why is spatial data analysis relevant now?

Back in the beginning, we were building systems for municipalities or counties and cities. And now everything’s global. My company, Skyhook is originally a provider of location on mobile devices, right? We build location based on wifi that puts a blue dot on the map. The data that it is spun off of that is an enormous exhaust that everyone is now using to discretize and compartmentalize into pieces that can be used for analysts, for people like the folks in the lobby and a lot of the talks that were given here today.

The same things are happening in the municipalities, the same level of detail, like footprint level accuracy, high spatial-temporal accuracy, that was only possible – was even a stretch – back then to do it for a county or a city is now expected and possible globally, which is awesome. And it’s just going to get easier and there’s just going to continue to be more of it. So yeah, it has always been relevant. But I think the slope and the trajectory of it just is going to continue to grow.

How are you seeing direct impact with businesses?

If you’re on the analytical side of things, it’s kind of an expectation of there being data available for how many burgers are being sold in the McDonald’s on the corner versus the one three blocks away. That is only becoming a reality now. So everyone’s just kind of running to keep up with the expectation that everyone has.

And it requires thousands of people working on hundreds of problems consistently with just this persistent attention to these problem sets. Many of the rules, which were written 30 or 40 years ago in the primitives and the geospatial science that was laid down, and it just continues to layer on top of itself. So it is just going to continue to blow out and explode into just a necessary component of any analytical fact.