CARTO Announces Data Enhancements to Unlock Use Cases for Location Intelligence

MADRID, April 19, 2018 - CARTO , the leader in location intelligence, unveiled today at the CARTO Locations conference its new data strategy, anchored on derivative data streams, which optimize modern location data sources to help organizations to better harness the power of location intelligence across a variety of business challenges.

Derivative data streams, which pull raw data from actual business transactions and events, as opposed to traditional, static demographic data to create brand new data sets not available anywhere else, will be included in CARTO platform for the first time. These streams are combined from multiple sources such as financial transactions, GPS and telco, social media, vehicle sensors, and more to allow citizens, governments and organizations to make decisions based on the current state of a situation rather than making assumptions on what likely happened in the past.

“Organizations want to benefit from the modern data sources made available by IoT and Big Data, but we often hear from them that they are limited to the information they collect, or to outdated, point-in-time data sets,” said Javier de la Torre, CEO at CARTO. “We are taking the lead to make it easy for these organizations to actually use those newly available data streams to solve business problems.”

Available immediately, the Foot Traffic data layer combines mobile events and GPS data to measure the number of pedestrians in transit to and from distinct locations. Users can leverage insights about foot traffic to make critical business decisions such as site selection, marketing planning, competitive analysis or sales forecasting. This is available through CARTO’s Data Observatory, which already includes a wide variety of data sets from a network of industry-leading partners such as Zillow, the Consumer Data Research Centre, and the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies.

Typically, raw data collected is difficult to work with and contains biases which often lead to errors in decision-making. In addition to anonymizing and aggregating the data to ensure responsible use, CARTO’s Data science team cleans and removes biases in the data, making it ready for spatial analysis and visualization. Organizations can immediately combine it with their own data and Location Intelligence solutions for more comprehensive analyses.

To make these new data sources more accessible for analytics, CARTO is also announcing the ability to query data from its Data Observatory through CARTOframes , meaning data scientists can leverage CARTO data through Python programming language without leaving their Python environment. CARTOFrames creates connectors to the CARTO Data Observatory so data scientists can supplement their own data with third party sources for better models, predictions, and machine learning processes in their preferred environment.

To learn more about CARTO’s third party data streams visit https://carto.com/data-observatory/ .

For more information on CARTOFrames, visit this blog post, https://carto.com/blog/inside/CARTOframes-python-interface-CARTO/.

About CARTO

CARTO is leading the location intelligence revolution. We are the platform that turns location data into better behavioral marketing, optimized delivery routes, strategic store placements and maximized assets. Everyone, from data scientists to business analysts, use our open, cloud software to understand where things happen, why they happen and predict what will happen in the future.

CARTO was founded in 2012 by a team of experts in geospatial development, big data analytics, and visualization techniques. The company is based in New York City and Madrid, with additional locations in London, Washington, DC, and Estonia. CARTO has a team of more than 1,500 global customers and more than 200,000 users over the globe, and is backed by investors including Accel and Salesforce Ventures.