Location, location, location IQ
Marke Andrews
Sun
If, say, you want to start a chain of coffee shops in the Metro Vancouver area, Sean Gorman recommends using visual intelligence (also called location intelligence) which provides digital maps and data to give a snapshot — actually more a panorama than a snapshot — of an area.
Using this technology, you can determine the abundance and location of competitors in various neighbourhoods, the demographics of a specific neighbourhood to see how many high-income earners live there, transit routes, transit stops and roads, crime rates, unemployment rates, the number of home foreclosures over the past year, even the number of parking tickets issued on
nearby streets.
Visual and location intelligence has fast become essential not only for starting new businesses, but for managing existing businesses, says Gorman, who is CEO of Arlington, Va.-based FortuisOne and a speaker at this week’s GeoWeb (today through Friday at the Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue), the annual conference devoted to geographic information systems.
FortuisOne has a system called GeoIQ, which retrieves data and creates maps that allow people to analyze information. For entrepreneurs, the maps can be very useful as they plan their next move.
It is important to make the maps easily readable by the public.
“We invested a lot of time in focus groups and user studies and worked with cartographers at the University of Wisconsin,” Gorman said in a telephone interview. They came up with something called a map brewer, a process that creates an “aesthetically pleasing and statistically accurate map.”
For a story last February, The Vancouver Sun used FortuisOne to help map where the most parking tickets are written in Vancouver.
“Before computers, when maps were paper-based, artists drew maps that were interpretive to try to convey a message,” said Ron Lake, chairman and CEO of Vancouver-based Galdos Systems, and a GeoWeb organizer. He cites the tourist maps with icons of landmarks, large buildings and museums that may be out of scale and have a kind of cartoonish look but communicate with the map-reader.
Gorman says visual intelligence is not only valuable to those thinking of starting a chain of coffee shops, it also helps existing chains of coffee shops. Using it, they can find out why certain outlets succeed while others fail.
Lake said location intelligence can help consumers make informed decisions, citing the example of a home buyer looking for a West Vancouver home with a view. If all the realtors with West Van homes for sale had photos from their front and back decks available, the homebuyer could narrow his search. If you want to open a new bank branch and your clients tend to shop at certain stores, you may want to find an area where those kinds of stores are.
GeoWeb’s first two days will be devoted to workshops, with speakers and panels Wednesday through Friday.
For full information, go to geowebconference.org.
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