How location data can transform your business

Not far from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, The California Institute of Technology, and scores of startups like UberMedia, you can find a typewriter repair shop. The firm has been located in Pasadena, California for more than 100 years. While it might seem out of place in the age of laptops and cloud computing, it has at least one important thing in common with its tech-savvy neighbors — the right location. The difference, however, is that you probably wouldn’t expect a typewriter repair shop to thrive in such a time and place.

That expectation comes from powerful, but sometimes incorrect or incomplete, assumptions about the world around us. Increasingly, the use of location data is challenging some of these assumptions and transforming our communities and businesses.   

Cities are becoming smarter.  They are increasingly exploring the use of mobile location-based data to enhance services, ease traffic congestion, and plan for the future.

Cities across the United States, and the world, are using location data to provide enhanced municipal services via location-based applications for citizen reporting, piecing together location information to help solve crimes and using it to alert citizens in emergency situations. Some of this data is provided by GPS on the phone; some comes from beacons or other sensors as cities evolve.  

Location data may be combined with other available data, such as social, to help cities better understand sentiment, fight crime and even identify potholes.  Chicago, for example, uses geotagged social data to look for keywords such as “potholes” in order to quickly find potential problems.  

This is only the beginning of how data is transforming cities for the better.

Location data is also helping businesses of all types, from automotive to retail and even typewriter repair shops, address very real business challenges.

Let’s start with automotive.  Visits to car dealerships have declined over the past 10 years.