Welcome to the Location Data Blog!

Urban planners and transport economists need location data to build better cities and facilitate equitable and convenient access to public transit. The movement of people within an area and between various Points-of-interest (POI) can provide valuable insights for city administrations, governments and businesses. Inaccessible facilities and public transit networks impact the socio-economic conditions of people living in an area, and therefore, affect the quality of their lives.  

This week, we are celebrating collecting a quarter million Points-of-Interest with Geolancer. We have reached the 250,000 POI milestone in just 12 months, starting in two countries in Southeast Asia, and gradually expanding to five. Scaling a new product from zero is something we are proud of; however, our platform’s real strength lies in its quality. There is not a single dataset in the industry that even comes close to Geolancer’s accurate, complete, and rich metadata.

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.