2016 is off to a great start! Now that we’re one month in, it is time to set the tone for the rest of the year and some of that planning and insight is best visualized. Some industries are already making the most our of data-driven visualizations and their business intelligence.

Banking and finance are data-driven industries. Any leading company knows that one of the best ways to gain valuable, actionable insights on that data is to visualize it. Our approach to visualization allows you to locate patterns and engage with trends that lie hidden in your data.

For example, financial analysts at BBVA use CartoDB to visualize and analyze credit card history to see who is spending where, at what time of day, and in what quantities.

Mastercard identified different spending demographics from tourists groups depending on where they are coming from and where they were going.

To learn how you can harness the power of location intelligence for your institution, join us for our webinar, ‘Gain the Competitive Business Advantage with CartoDB Visualizations’Thursday, February 18 at 1 PM EST hosted by our partners manager, Jaime de Mora.

And of course to spread a little extra love we have two additional webinars this month:

• ‘Gain Insights and Explore Data Effortlessly with CartoDB’ on February 4, hosted by Eric Bean
• ‘From the CartoDB Editor to your own Web App’ on February 25, hosted by Erik Escoffier

Happy data mapping!

Last night the Carolina Panthers were smothered by the Denver Broncos in what ended in a two-touchdown lead game. How did the U.S. react? What did they think about that last call on possession? Will we ever come to a consensus on whether Beyonce stumbled during her performance?

One of the most lively and active forum of public opinion during Super Bowl 50 is Twitter. Millions of users tuned and logged on to comment in real-time on the various aspects of one of the most televised events in American television.

CartoDB technology allows organizations, such as Twitter to interact and talk with audiences, get more insights, and knowledge about demographics, while making the most of events around the world. For example, in this choropleth map of
the US, each state is colored depending on which team is tweeted about the most in each state.

As seen from this Twitter map the Panthers were widely favored across the U.S. with more and more people and states tweeting about the Panthers and Cam Newton. Despite this being Peyton Manning’s assumed last bowl game (he’s one of the oldest quarterbacks in NFL history to go to a Super Bowl game - the second being John Elway), Colorado, not entirely a shocker, seemed to be the only state heavily tweeting about the Broncos. Oh and there was Beyonce. Without a doubt #SB50 is by far the number one news and media topic covered all over the 50 states.

This map is a live Twitter map during the game! Every time the Broncos intercepts a Panthers play or when Beyonce almost stumbled on stage, all of that can be seen visually but the reactions can be mapped via location on a Twitter map. The data-driven visualization has a time series widget that displays the percentage of tweets by both teams and the halftime show, and a widget that shows the top six most talked about players throughout the game. You can interact with the map and filter for Broncos or Panthers or Manning or Newton - or any other player - or different combinations thereof.

Coldplay, Bruno Mars, and Beyonce gave a winning performance.
But Unfortunately, for Cam Newton, Twitter maps and public sentiment can’t predict the outcome of games, maybe they forgot something in Formation. :(

This is just one out of several examples of show location intelligence can help you gain insights!

Happy data mapping!

Here at CartoDB we strive to reach new heights of excellence in technology for cities and citizens. Our civic-loving users have always pushed the boundaries of how location intelligence is applied to urban practices, and now we’re giving back in a big way.

Cities across the world world including New York, Mexico City, and Medellin [http://go.cartodb.com/visualizing-the-future-of-smart-cities-with-location-intelligence-cartodb] use CartoDB to reach the next level of analysis and prediction with location intelligence.

By creating real-time interactive dashboards with sophisticated analytical capacities, government institutions, businesses and citizens, can deeply explore everything from government agency efficiency to predictive business analytics, to community level initiatives in unprecedented ways.

Since CartoDB has quickly become a leader in the urban-technology space, we thought it wise to give back to our urban communities by announcing our
Urban-Geo Tech Newsletter, a cities and geospatial technologies newsletter to keep you on the leading edge of urban-geo news!

Register for our Geo-Urban newsletter to learn about civic improvement:

Register

You will stay up-to-date on everything from:

• Smart Cities mapping
• The Internet of Things
• Innovative Civic Technologies

If you want to learn more about how CartoDB is shaping cities, read our
‘Urban Insights: an Analysis of the Future of our Cities and Technology’
white paper and stay tuned!

Happy data mapping!

Late last year, the second season of the podcast Serial began. The very popular first season in 2014 had re-investigated an old case of murder in Baltimore. It gripped audiences with its reporting and was a thrilling listen every week.

When the new season began in December, they took a global turn, looking closely at the case of Bowe Bergdahl, the soldier held captive for five years and the circumstances which led up to his capture and later release. It was a geographic story shift from the US to the whole world. Curious about where people were listening and commenting, we decided to do a little investigation.

We fired up CartoDB’s twitter firehose, entering @serial as the search term to see where on earth the tweets were coming from in the first week.

The launch week’s tweets (12/10-12/17) were put into a map. The results were definitely global, with tweets coming from some remote corners of the planet, which was interesting and chances are the previous show may not have had
that reach.

Animating them over time with torque showed us the passage of tweets over the week. We aggregated the tweets at any single location: > -torque-aggregation-function:”sum(1)”;

That gave us a bubble that grew as tweets were generated about Serial. Now we could see where people were saying the most – places like New York, London and Chicago. But across the world there were smaller, unexpected places, too, in South America and Africa.

We handed this to our friends at Serial as a friendly data gesture, and they loved it. We woke up to the podcast announcement that they were switching to a bi-weekly format, and as we were listening, Sarah Koenig, the host of Serial mentioned the map we had given them (and posted it on their site).

During the in-between weeks we will have more posts and graphics on our website. In fact, we just put up this beautiful thing, this map of the world with all these twinkling dots that show where tweets have come from, responding to the show. So, you know, obvious places like the East Cost of the US – but then, Mongolia, Afghanistan, Chile, Nigeria, Papua New Guinea, Canada. It’s made me so happy to see it, like we’re all holding up lighters all over the globe.

So a little bit of twitter data made the show feel a sense of community, which is why we love the twitter access CartoDB offers, as well. It makes it easy to get a heartbeat from the planet on any topic you’d like.

Happy Twitter mapping!

Mobile World Congress is fast approaching and we simply can’t wait to see all the great insights and hard work from the mobile community the world over.

In addition to appearing at our booth with several other CartoDB members, our CEO Javier de la Torre will demo an engaging and stunning demo of CartoDB’s latest technological development. You definitely won’t want to miss this.

The semi-private event will be held at 14:30 on Wednesday, February 24,
at the Mobile World Capital booth CS70 in Congress Square. Immediately following will be a reception with traditional Spanish appetizers!

Please contact sales@cartodb.com to reserve your space. Limited spots
are available.

This presentation is sure to set the location intelligence world spinning!

See you in Barcelona!

As we ease into 2016, we feel reflective about the changes and their magnitude in our industry. For instance, just a few of weeks ago, one of the most popular geospatial initiatives came to an end, with Google deprecating Google Maps Engine (GME). In response, CartoDB created a platform that works with Google Cloud, which offered Google’s clients the option to stay in the same Google ecosystem while providing a seamless transition to the most similar platform
to GME.

Yet it still seems like yesterday when we launched as an effortless tool for turning geospatial data into interactive maps. Since 2015, CartoDB has grown into a location intelligence software solution for deep geospatial analysis and visual data discovery, providing features such as dynamic data filtering, an ability to retrieve complex geospatial queries, available on the cloud and on-premises.

Our evolution, the flexible SQL API and new additional features, made CartoDB the optimal replacement to the deprecated Google Maps Engine (GME). Organizations as diverse as New York City DoITT, Royal Bank of Scotland, T-Mobile, Leroy Merlin, Amtrak, and Roads and Maritime Transportation of New South Wales have selected CartoDB as their alternative of choice.

Leading Google geo partners and technology solutions providers worldwide have joined forces with CartoDB to provide a viable alternative to GME - including among others CloudSherpas, AppGeo, NGIS, Wabion, Servinformación, Onix, Woolpert, Snowdrop Solutions, RichiTech, Kartakkeskus, and Noovle.

Additionally, we expanded our Partners network, Partners Management team, developed several joint solutions in various verticals and celebrated a successful CartoDB15 with more beloved partners attending the conference than ever before, representing several countries worldwide. We’ve made a commitment to providing even more support, partner training, and content focused on the developments of all our partners. This is just the beginning.

Our main objective in 2016 and beyond is to continue to expand our best-in-class leadership team, support our partners worldwide, and enhance our product to meet the demanding needs for enterprise companies. The global traction we’ve made in just the past year, along with the sterling roster of industry leaders we’re working with is huge validation to the value we’re bringing. We’re thrilled to continue making waves with our core mission of democratizing location intelligence, and helping people understand their world through the use of location data.

Thank you explorers, inquisitive minds, and awesome partners for your unconditional support!

Happy data mapping!

We absolutely love client success stories that make use of big data and provide great insights for customers all over the world. In this case, the insights are for one of the fastest growing global fields, real estate.

Reporte Inmobiliario is a digital platform where you can find information related to the real estate market in South America. Their direct mission is to inform users on the simple and concrete variables of real estate and help them achieve a free and transparent market. Reporte lnmobiliario also promotes the analysis of data and the production of information on the real estate market.

They used CartoDB to improve its business by giving visibility to their clients through data-driven visualizations and reports. The visualizations have increased traffic to their website and allowed customers to visualize real estate market trends to give better service to their clients.

Location is everything in real estate. That’s why a tool like CartoDB allows agencies like Reporte Inmobiliario to perform the necessary tasks to focus primarily on location. Their report allows for a quick and easy analysis and produces incredible results. Reporte Inmobiliario understood that the property market needed to be made transparent and that CartoDB could help in
that process.

The agency leverages the popularity of subway maps to provide insights on the very important decision of living or conducting business near a metro stop. Clients can now provide complete transparency deals and meet various customer concerns and requests. For that, Reporte Inmobiliario visualized rent prices depending on how close a building was to the metro/tube.

In these visualizations Reporte Inmobiliario analyzed data for property by using the visits to specific properties to see what were common trends in 2015:

For example, were people visiting office spaces, co-working spaces, apartments, condos, or houses? Did people in South America want to live closer or further from a public park or metro stop? All those answers and more can be discovered with Reporte Inmobiliario’s CartoDB visualization.

Reporte Inmobiliario compared the price of the value per m2 in this map to generate insights that allow real estate and construction services to see how much the price is for similar properties on the block. Allowing property agents to assess a property and construction firms to see what the average selling price for the area where they intend to build buildings. The service allows them to filter properties by type (house, apartment, similar house), number of rooms, new
or used units.

2015 was one of the worst years for construction in Argentina. Many development projects were left unfinished and disproportionately affected some neighborhoods more than others in Buenos Aires.

“All the reports that we’ve developed with CartoDB in the past year have been well received. Two of them have even set a record of visits to our site. All have had a fantastic impact in the press and on our social networks. I think people really gravitate toward the visualizations, looking for insights,” Andrés Ávila,
CTO at Reporte Inmobiliario.

Want to learn more about how CartoDB is the the tool for impactful real estate insights? Register for our webinar, Thursday, March 17 at 12PM EDT.

Happy data mapping!

We are pleased to announce that CartoDB has acquired Nutiteq, a pioneer in native mobile mapping. Nutiteq joins us with more than 8 years of experience developing mobile applications and will provide a great foundation for new CartoDB mobile SDKs.

CartoDB’s goal is to empower everyone to take advantage of location data to make better decisions. And now, more than ever, those decisions are being made in the field, using mobile devices. We believe that there is an untapped opportunity to rethink how the world interacts with location data and mobile devices. This is where Nutiteq comes in.

The Nutiteq SDK is now available to all our clients, expanding the capabilities of our platform to support custom development of applications with maps on any mobile platform—Android, iOS, and Windows Phone. Nutiteq SDK’s existing capabilities will be augmented with CartoDB services, enabling online and offline maps, GIS data editing, 3D features, and much more.

We’re really looking forward to seeing what our users and clients build with it. So far, the Nutiteq SDK is being used by more than 15M users through different applications including: SeatGeek, Lonely Planet, and Accenture.

We’re thrilled to be working alongside Jaak Laineste and the entire Nutiteq team. They will join CartoDB from their headquarters in Tartu, Estonia, our newest office. To learn more, check out our product page.

Best,
Javier de la Torre,
CEO of CartoDB

NSGIC’s Midyear Conference at the Lowe’s Annapolis Hotel In Annapolis, Maryland, is almost upon us and CartoDB is proud to be a first-year, bronze-level sponsor for this event and the annual conference in October.

For two days next week, February 22-23, the CartoDB team will be at NSGIC’s Midyear Conference discussing how CartoDB’s technology can help organizations to meet their geospatial needs and solve their challenges in location intelligence, and spatial data.

We are looking forward to meeting each of you (especially in the Speed Networking portion zip zip hello hello)! Please feel free to drop by and ask us about anything, from our new mobile team to the interesting things on the horizon and much more.

Reach out to either Jeff Ferzoco or David Bryson to set up a meeting in advance!

See you in Annapolis next Tuesday!

Everyone loves a good story. More than 90 media channels use CartoDB to tell incredible data-driven stories and create industry-leading publications. Because we love our data journalists, we aim to foster a strong community and provide exceptional resources to we can all investigate more deeply and tell
better stories.

Do you want to join our growing community and learn how CartoDB is shaping the field of journalism?

Register for our Geo-Jour newsletter to learn about how to create engaging visualizations:

Sign up here!

CartoDB allows journalists to create stunning visualizations that add new dimensions to important news stories that drive traffic to your articles and engage your readers in new ways.

Our newsletter will help you get the most out of CartoDB with:

• Leading-edge data journalism projects
• New resources to take stories to the next level
• Love of visualizations!
• Free and open maps to include in your publications
• Free and open data to explore and tell stories with

Are you interested in learning more? See how Spotify and Tecnilogica have improved brand awareness using CartoDB.

Happy data mapping!

Rilos, a business-to-business consulting firm that provides solutions and site-location reports to real estate developers, commercial real estate consultants,
and retail data analysts, leverages location intelligence to provide innovative
and impactful insights for their industry!

Rilos created Geomatrix, an online customer-centric solution, dedicated to quickly producing user-friendly analytical reports directly for employees and clients, bypassing the need for GIS and other specialists. The Geomatrix app aggregates big data, technologies, and algorithms in a single online platform to generate site studies. With Geomatrix delivering analysis directly to clients, Rilos was able to focus on the creation of new custom content.

Now, you can discover how to free up your time and provide a complete customer solution for your business.

Join our webinar and learn just how Rilos, leveraged location intelligence
with Geomatrix:

Register!

With Geomatrix, subscribers can audit the commercial environment of their existing point of sales portfolio, compare this data with operational results, and process a correlation analysis to determine which external parameters are impacting point of sales turnover.

Rilos also uses CartoDB for internal workflow improvement and to see the
impact of its business!

This webinar will be hosted by Arnaud Trousset, Founder and Managing Director at Rilos.

Happy data mapping!

Welcome, CartoDB community, to Deep Insights—CartoDB’s solution to make the invisible visible, and allow you to discover unseen correlations and patterns at an unprecedented scale.

CartoDB’s Deep Insights technology enables the visualization, exploration, dynamic filtering, and drill-down of data to unforeseen granular levels. Additionally, CartoDB’s Deep Insights is equipped with dashboards that come with a complete set of widgets that allow you to pan and zoom to different locations on your map, updating values for the area you are currently viewing, in real time!

Imagine you’re a business development manager of a telecommunication company that wishes to expand its market reach beyond local customers, and you have the geolocations of your existing retail shops and towers. Additionally, the census tract information you have access to with Deep Insights gives you the ability to identify where your ideal target audience is, which in turn gives you the power to identify where to concentrate your sales and marketing efforts on the exact target audience you’d like to attract.

You can start by filtering target age groups (20s, 30s, and 40s) and income (above 100k). The visualization highlights your target areas to find your first new customers and continues filtering through the widgets, to identify a low number of home owners — your company wants people renting, not owning. Next, you filter for those people with a high level of disposable income.

Now, you have identified where exactly your target audience in NYC is, so your company is in the best position on making the right business decisions.

Last but not least, the rich cartographic capabilities of CartoDB can make your visualization unique, ensuring you display contextual and time-based location data in the most pertinent way, regardless of the source. And now thanks to Deep Insights your data can be correlated and augmented, algorithmically attaching columns of information by calculating the location of your points.

CartoDB’s Deep Insights is available for you in a single user-friendly interface that can stand-alone or integrate with your own application or workflow. The pricing has been re-designed to support your success, enabling you to provide location insights to as many users as needed, with a fix price model that you can rely on as your organization grows.

Explore CartoDB for Deep Insights in-depth or contact our Sales team for more details.

Happy data mapping!

Location intelligence is an often heard term, but what it means and how it can benefit businesses, institutions and individuals may not be immediately obvious. Location intelligence is more than analysis of geospatial information or geographic information systems alone, it is the capability to visualize spatial data to identify and analyze relationships. Evolving from GIS, location intelligence provides analytic and operational solutions across organizations.

How does all this data help people, and what about the customer or client? Organizations have discovered that data can be one of the best ways to get insights about customers and how to serve them better, increasing brand loyalty and improving customer relationship management. Linking customer addresses to a geographic area and then running these against internal company data and external demographics such as census data and income data, or other open data can provide unprecedented levels of detail. Who people are, what they do, and how and when they consume is tied to the where in essential ways. What is their neighborhood, commute, and workplace?

These locations and their spatial relationships lead to a more in-depth understanding of behavior and influences. Since a high percentage of data already has geographical information attached to it, insights about these relationships are readily available. Location intelligence now allows for incorporating external data from a variety of sources that can be combined and updated dynamically in the cloud. Companies can update the accessibility of their brand locations, marketing and potential new sites accordingly.

More than ever location intelligence has made it easy to map excel data, create data dashboards, and derive deep insights from location data. Discover how real companies across a range of industries and categories: finance, real estate, economic development and operational logistics are making use of location intelligence technology to gain a competitive edge in the marketplace.

Read our white paper and learn how to bring location intelligence to your business. See why the new business intelligence is location intelligence and harnessing the power of place to drive analysis and insights affects the
bottom line.

Happy data mapping!

As more governments and businesses are adopting proactive open data policies and programs, the infrastructure of data publishing is becoming increasingly important. The time-honored tradition of publishing file-based machine-readable data on the web is still alive and well, but live, api-accessible databases can help when publishing data that is updated frequently, or is so large that publishing it as files becomes inefficient. Luckily for you, if you have a CartoDB account, you already have a live, api-accessible database at your disposal! Read on to learn how CartoDB can help make your open data shine.

With CartoDB, any data you import becomes a bona fide PostgreSQL database table. We’re not talking about Postgres buried deep in the stack with a pretty UI obscuring it (our UI is indeed pretty), you have direct access to the database, and can run any SQL queries you want on it. The SQL pane in CartoDB’s UI is where most people start interacting with their tables, but it’s also accessible via our
SQL API.

That’s all well and good, but what if I want other people to have access to my data… to make it a bit more… open? CartoDB has the notion of public tables, where unauthenticated access to database read operations is available both via our GUI and via the SQL API. If you set a table’s privacy to public, anyone can access its various download links, or run SELECT queries to their heart’s content. This makes CartoDB the SIMPLEST way to go from a file on your computer to an easily-accessible published database on the web.

An Example: NYC’s PLUTO Dataset

The New York City Department of City Planning publishes a cadastral dataset called PLUTO, which contains a wealth of information about every tax lot in the city. The dataset includes zoning information, tax exemption status, number of floors, and has a detailed polygon for each parcel of land. As you can imagine, this is a very large dataset, and it includes over 800,000 features with over 80 attributes each. Check out our own Andrew Hill’s tour of NYC PLUTO data if you want to learn more about PLUTO).

The city publishes PLUTO as five separate file-based datasets, one for each of the five boroughs, on their infamous “Bytes of the Big Apple” open data site. While these chunks are more digestable, they are all still very large in their own right. PLUTO is only updated a couple of times a year, but due to its large size, it would be a great fit for publishing as a CartoDB public table.

I recently consoldated all 5 boroughs’ PLUTO data into a single CartoDB table. Here’s it’s landing page, which shows a tabular preview of the data and a map view, allowing you to quickly familiarize yourself with the dataset. The public landing page even includes download links for one-click access to CSV, SHP, KML, GeoJSON, and SVG!

So how is this any better than just publishing one big static file? Enter the SQL API, where CartoDB becomes really powerful. The full-dataset download links above are really just “SELECT * FROM {tablename}” queries executed against the SQL API, but with a little more SQL, a user can grab a much more specific subset of this very large dataset. The same SQL queries you apply in the editor to limit what data to show in your map can also be used to download raw data via the SQL API:

Here’s an API call to get only the first 10 rows:

https://cwhong.cartodb.com:443/api/v2/sql?q=select address,zipcode from public.pluto15v1 LIMIT 1

Go ahead and click it, you’ll get back some JSON. Here’s the same query, but requesting the data as CSV instead of JSON:

https://cwhong.cartodb.com:443/api/v2/sql?format=CSV&q=select address,zipcode from public.pluto15v1 LIMIT 1

Depending on your browser, clicking the above link should get you a file download.

To further illustrate this, I’ll provide some cdbfiddle examples from the same dataset that use different SQL queries. The same SQL used to define the map can also be passed to the SQL API to get raw data.

Get everything in zipcode 11201 (Downtown Brooklyn):

Here’s the same query as an API call, specifying geoJSON format (again, depending on your browser, clicking this link should start a file download!):

https://cwhong.cartodb.com:443/api/v2/sql?format=GeoJSON&q=SELECT the_geom, the_geom_webmercator, address, zipcode FROM pluto15v1 WHERE zipcode = 11201

Get everything where the primary zoning is Commercial:

This time let’s get a shapefile from the SQL API:

https://cwhong.cartodb.com:443/api/v2/sql?format=SHP&q=SELECT the_geom,the_geom_webmercator, address, zipcode, allzoning1 FROM pluto15v1 WHERE allzoning1 ILIKE ‘%C%’

With a little bit of frontend web development, it’s possible to build a custom interface for this data that helps the user hone in on a specific subset of the data to download without writing SQL. This PLUTO downloader tool does just that. The UI allows the user to choose a geographic area, a set of attributes, and a format. Behind the scenes it is building a SQL query and sending it to CartoDB, which serves up the data on-demand!

The big take-away for this blog post is that you shouldn’t think of CartoDB as simply as a map rendering tool, it serves up raw data just as elegantly and efficiently as it does map tiles.

But what about the catalog? CartoDB will provide a list of your public tables on your public profile page. This is certainly not a substitute for a fully-baked open data catalog with standards-compliant metadata, but it does tie together all the public tables in your account and make them a bit more discoverable.

The ‘by-hand’ option if you don’t have too many datasets to manage would simply be to create a page on your website or blog with links to each CartoDB table’s landing page, information about the datasets, and an embedded map preview.

Another option for the catalog side of the equation is CKAN (currently in use by data.gov and many other open data programs wordlwide), where you could quickly set up a listing for data that lives in a CartoDB public table. We’ve even worked on a script that can programmatically create a CKAN dataset listing for a CartoDB Table, adding name, description, and assets for the various SQL API download links. Data.gov has developed a CKAN extension that adds Open in CartoDB functionality to all of their dataset listings, allowing for one-click import of data into a user’s CartoDB account. Ontodia, an NYC Open Data consultancy and CartoDB partner, has also developed a tighter CKAN integration that allows for cloning of data between the CKAN datastore and CartoDB, and inclusion of CartoDB maps into a CKAN dataset page.

New York City’s IT Department (DoITT) is currently publishing geospatial open data for the New York City Subway along with a city-wide building footprints dataset via their enterprise CartoDB account.

Public Tables == Published Tables

When you make one of your CartoDB datasets public, you’ve essentially published it. Downloads are a click away, and API accessibility is easy using regular-old SQL statements. It only takes a few more steps to document and publicize your public table, either on a static page, a data catalog, or via a custom download tool.

Happy open data publishing!

Onix is a leading provider of IT solutions and services to a broad range of government and corporate customers. Onix partners with location intelligence industry leaders such as CartoDB and offers extensive expertise in the design and implementation of end-to-end comprehensive IT solutions.

Join Onix and CartoDB in a webinar session, hosted by Directions Magazine, that will surely bring you useful business insights.

Learn just how Onix leverages location intelligence for business intelligence that really matters!

Register

In this webinar you will learn:

• How integrating existing information management systems will enable your business development team to make informed and make intelligent business decisions
• How visualizing market data and trends will empower your marketing team’s campaigns and lead to a better understanding of your customer base
• How adding context for business data and geospatial data along with points of interest to make informed decisions can provide extra value to your customers
• How turning geospatial data and relationships into meaningful insights across your organization and departments will enable users to make better and faster decisions
• How mapping big data can deliver clear analytics that are useful company-wide

Join us for ‘Discover How Data-Driven Maps Can Deliver Insights Company-Wide Quickly’ a collaborative webinar hosted by Onix team members: Zack Schreiber, Account Manager, Michael Sliwka, Geospatial Engineer, and Tracee Hurley, North America and Canada Partners Manager and David Bryson, Solutions Engineer at CartoDB.

Happy data mapping!

Using CartoDB.js and the CartoDB Platform, you get the best of both worlds: powerful GIS technologies with no setup required combined with the complete freedom provided by the HTML5 stack.

It’s so addictive in fact, that at some point you’ll be building a ton of interactive maps without even realizing it. And inevitably, you will end up doing a few repetitive tasks every time: creating boilerplate files, importing JavaScript libraries, setting up a local web server, etc…

This is were this new tool kicks in: The CartoDB Yeoman Generator.

Yeoman allows front-end developers to start new projects with a scaffolding to build on: a set of files, tools, and configuration adapted to every kind of website and app (what is called a generator in Yeoman lingo). The CartoDB Generator will let you start your project with the essentials:

• A local web server

• Files watcher and live reload

• JavaScript linting with ESLint

• Optionally, a Gist repository is automatically created for your project, which will allow you to showcase your work with no extra steps, using bl.ocks.org for example.

Additionally, the generator will offer you several templates to choose from:

• A barebones but working example with CartoDB.js

• A template using Bootstrap

• And many more to come…

Vizualisation projects are usually relatively small compared to weeks or month long web projects, which is why we don’t often deem it necessary to set up the most advanced tooling. The CartoDB Generator allows you to optionally use the most advanced JavaScript/ES6 and CSS features, using BabelJS and PostCSS.

Want to learn more about building websites and apps with CartoDB? View our Map Academy!

This month we announced our acquirement of Nutiteq, a leader in SDK development for all mobile platforms, and our latest innovation, Deep Insights, for unprecedented big data analysis at any scale. In March, we want to continue to help you go further with location intelligence and CartoDB.

Join several webinar sessions that help you familiarize yourself with location intelligence and data-driven visualizations that derive insights for better,
faster decisions.

March Webinars:

• March 3Register

  Introductory webinar: Get started using CartoDB and bring location data to life

• March 9Register

  Learn how to leverage location data for actionable insights with Rilos

• March 15Register

  Discover how data-driven maps can deliver insights company-wide quickly

• March 17Register

  Use location intelligence to visualize and analyze markets and trends

• March 30Register

  How to create an insightful visualization by improving the design — Part I

Happy data mapping!

This map shows the ethnic diversity of the US by showing one point for every 100 people of a given ethnicity. It was inspired by this map created by the cooper center.

To make the map we used data from the census along with a method called dot density. For each census block group we know from the census the number of people who reported themselves as Asian, Black, White and Hispanic of Latino. This allows us to make chlropleth maps in the same way you are probably used to showing each ethnicity. For example here is a map showing the counts of people who indicated they are Black on the census:

What if we want to show all the ethnicities on the same map? What if we wanted to have a map that gets much closer to conveying the number of people who are reporting in the census along with their make up? Well thats when dot density can be useful. By using this following PLPGSQL function, which you can add to you own account simply by copying and pasting it in to the SQL panel on CartoDB, we can turn geometries and counts in to points in those geometries.

We can run this function for each ethnic group in our dataset as so:

This will return a table of points, one for every 100 people in the census tagged by their etnhnic group. The result (after some considerable computation time) is this map, which conveys the shear number of people in the census along with who the diversity of ethnic groups across the US.

It took quite a while on one of our largest plans to make the dot density for the entire US so we recommend you use this method for smaller areas where it can still be really powerful!

How people get to work?

Of course you aren’t limited to just making dot density maps of ethnic groups. You can use any data that is a number count of people in a geometry. For example Daniel McGlone over at Azavea produced this blog post about using the same function to map out how people in Phillidelphia

We hope this has given you some ideas for how to apply the Dot Density method to your own maps. If you make one share it with us on twitter or post in the comments.

Happy Mapping.

Everything happens somewhere and CartoDB understands that location intelligence is everywhere. Where is the intersection of everything and everywhere? The simple answer is location intelligence, a market that CartoDB leads. We know that the location intelligence market is rapidly changing, with 80% of data having a location component, but only 10% of organizations and companies making use of it. CartoDB wants to change that.

CEO and co-founder, Javier de la Torre presented at FirstMark’s Data Driven NYC on February 16, 2016. Javier’s talk provided real examples of using location data to solve complicated problems.

After presenting ‘Problem Solving with Geospatial Data,’ Javier sat down with host Matt Turck, partner at FirstMark, for an informative Q & A on how CartoDB and location intelligence are disrupting everything, somewhere.

Data Driven NYC is a monthly event covering big data and data-driven products and startups, hosted by Matt. FirstMark is an early stage venture capital firm based in New York City.

CartoDB is the next generation location intelligence and data visualization engine that enables the transformation of location data into insights. Discover how CartoDB can provide the solutions and business intelligence you’ve been
looking for.

Happy data mapping!

Are you ready to look at maps in an unorthodox way and expand your cartographic horizons? The “Creative Cartography and Beers on March 11, in Paris, will do just that. And more importantly, seek to establish bridges between mapping and other fields - particularly creative coding and design.

Here’s the full lineup for this meetup :

• Caroline and Leo from Dataveyes, an award-winning dataviz studio in Paris, will be giving design tips and tricks that deal with information density.

• Clara and Jules are collaborators of Le Monde, and founders of the GoumProd collective. Their talk, “Cartographismes”, will be about incongruous cartographies, experimenting with graphical codes in maps, and exploring the unknown or surprising territories.

• Nicolas, a talented graphic coder, will show his latest technical experiments around maps (particularly in 3D).

• Erik from CartoDB will explore some interestingly complex datasets using technical black magic.

Le Tank will be hosting this event at their venue. Le Tank is a beautiful co-working space in Bastille, the heart of Paris, that also organizes many other events. The philosophy of Le Tank is to abolish barriers between disciplines, to promote diversity in communities, and to bring complex topics to a mainstream audience.

Knowing how awesome the mapping community is in Paris, CartoDB is happy to support this event. Erik will be attending and presenting at this event, please come and say, “hi!”