Welcome to the Location Data Blog!

If the location data supply chain was a river, it would look pretty murky. This lack of transparency comes from two main concerns: the complicated and entangled relationships between suppliers and buyers of data, and the issue of consent. 

In this article, we will focus on the second problem and explain why consented data is especially important in today’s market and show you how Quadrant is developing new ways to clean, track, verify, and bring transparency to the industry with blockchain technology and the Quadrant Consent Management Platform (QCMP). 

Business Intelligence (BI) and data science companies harness location data to help their clients understand target audiences better. Insights derived from analyzing human mobility patterns can help retailers, FMCG, online services, and many other companies conduct effective marketing campaigns, expand to new areas, measure ROI, find underserved consumers, and more. 

A screenshot of Mapoteca’s analytics platform showing O-D analysis for specific POIs based on mobility data. 

Businesses in need of accurate or customized Point-of-Interest (POI) data don't have good choices: crowdsourced or web-scraped POIs are often questionable in quality, and managed services are impossible to scale at a reasonable cost. Our proprietary POI Data-as-a-Service platform, Geolancer, is unique because it delivers the quality of managed services, the coverage of crowdsourcing, and the scalability of web scraping.

In this article, we highlight how we scaled Geolancer from zero to thousands of POIs in just a matter of weeks on markets as different as The Netherlands and Indonesia.

The location data industry is characterised by opaque supply chains, making it challenging for buyers to procure high-quality datasets. Quadrant’s mission to instill transparency into the industry starts with how and where we source the data. We have been successfully working on acquiring data right where it is created, incentivizing developers to ethically monetize their mobile apps.

One way of doing this is SDK integration, which we have covered in detail. The other, increasingly popular method is Server-to-Server (S2S) integration; in this piece, we give readers a peek behind the curtain so that they can understand how S2S works.  

Countless platforms are powered by Point-of-Interest (POI) datasets that are outdated. More importantly, these datasets are not even tailored to the unique requirements of different businesses. For instance, even though a restaurant represents one POI, a specialised search engine will need information on the dietary restrictions that are catered to by the establishment while a food delivery platform needs to know if it has a drive through – data that represents distinct, custom attributes.