Welcome to the Location Data Blog!

The needs of urban communities continuously evolve due to socio-economic, geopolitical, and environmental changes. Therefore, the consistent development and redevelopment of cities is essential for addressing the changing needs of urban citizens. 

Analyzing large-scale mobility patterns allows urban planners, researchers, and public officials to gauge how people’s behavior changes in response to various events and developments. It can also help determine which of their current needs cannot be satisfied through existing services and facilities. 

Location intelligence is a powerful tool as it enables the creation and implementation of master plans that make cities more resilient and people-centric. In this article, we discuss how precise and comprehensive movement insights can help urban planners.

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.

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. 

Countless platforms are powered by Point-of-Interest (POI) datasets that are outdated.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.