Welcome to the Location Data Blog!

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?

A few weeks ago, we discussed the seven most important parameters for data buyers to consider before purchasing location data. One of those factors is the health and quality of data. Is the data complete, accurate, and usable? Does it need additional preparation? How many unique values does the dataset actually contain?

Quadrant, a global leader in location data and intelligence solutions, is delighted to announce its new Point-of-Interest (POI) Data-as-a-Service.

In today's increasingly complex digital economy, many modern applications and systems depend on POI data. From our engagements with customers across multiple industries, we have found that accurate POI data is a critical defining factor of customer satisfaction and operational efficiency.

Companies in the location data industry like to highlight the numerous uses and benefits of their data. However, the topic of how to select a data vendor remains largely undiscussed. As the old adage goes, ‘garbage in, garbage out’: low quality data leads to unsubstantiated, weak insights, and ultimately to wrong decisions. To ensure that the data you acquire helps you solve your business challenges, you need to evaluate data quality. 

Data analysis plays a crucial role in detecting bad, misleading, and even fraudulent data. The data economy is full of such low-quality data, especially when dealing with location data.

Providing the highest-quality location data should be the goal of data providers, and so this is an issue close to home for those of us playing this role in the industry - an issue to be taken seriously.

Let’s consider some of the various sources of location data, and what data feed characteristics tend to indicate about quality.