Data at Work

High-quality Point-of-Interest (POI) data is the backbone of all location-based businesses and applications. Your customers rely on you to find day-to-day services such as transportation, food delivery, online shopping, and more. The speed, accuracy, and reliability in providing these services can be a determining factor in gaining and retaining customers.

But how do you ensure that the data powering your business are of good quality and up to date?

There are numerous data providers that claim to offer vast, accurate, and ideal POI datasets, but how do you correctly assess them? In this post, we will discuss a few factors to consider before buying POI data. Use them as a checklist for your purchase decision while selecting a data vendor!

Location intelligence has revolutionised the way companies establish, operate and expand their business. From deciding an optimal location for a new store to performing footfall analysis to gauge competition in an area - location intelligence helps companies make faster, well-informed and profitable decisions.

One of the critical components of location intelligence is Point-of-Interest (POI) data. A POI indicates a specific location in an area of interest for a business. It could be a retail store, a hospital, a university, or a commercial building depending on what intel you need. POI data is vital to maximising returns on marketing and advertising, expanding a business to new areas, powering maps and navigation systems for logistics and supply chain and more.

To adequately leverage POI data, buyers must understand the type of data they need, the scale they need it at, and understand the best way to represent the acquired data to fit their use case. Here are the various ways to represent POI data, and how these methods can help answer questions to specific use cases and applications.

In the last eight years, the public discourse and the regulatory environment around privacy have changed dramatically. Snowden’s revelations, 2013. GDPR, 2016. CCPA, 2018. Seeing the demand for increased privacy, Apple will soon introduce changes that will give people even more choice over what they want to share with companies. But what do all these mean for businesses working with location data?