This week it was announced that Foursquare and Factual are planning to merge. Both use location data to improve advertising and overall business intelligence. But unlike Foursquare, Factual doesn't have a consumer-facing app. So most of us probably haven't heard of them before. But they are some of the data and tech behind many of the companies that we do all know, including Starbucks.

I have long been fascinated by location-based startups -- like Foursquare -- because they are inherently spatial. And how we move about our cities and spaces is rich with information. Companies want this data because, among other things, it is a register of intent. Me going somewhere signals certain things, including where else my kind might want to go.

But location data can also be used for many other things beyond advertising and retail analytics. Foursquare has started sharing aggregated and anonymized foot traffic data with local governments and public health officials in the fight against COVID-19. That data is currently powering http://www.visitdata.org. Foursquare is also publishing a regular insights report.

Here is a chart from them showing casino visits in Clark County since March 1:

In many ways this chart is fairly obvious. In fact, it actually mirrors my own journey into isolation. After the NBA shutdown on Wednesday, March 11, things started to feel pretty real and on Friday I was working from home. But there's a lot more that can be done with location data and there's a lot more that will be done going forward. I am confident that will help not only business, but also society more broadly.

There's a lot of speculation (that's all you can really do) about what our world is going to look like on the other side of this pandemic.

I think it's easy to overreach at a time like this and prognosticate dramatic change -- such as the demise of cities and urbanity as we know it. But while I do believe that there are bound to be changes, I also know that after 9/11 most of us eventually stopped being afraid of flying and of being in tall buildings. We forgot and moved on.

So, what might change?

Scott Galloway argued on his blog today that "things won't change as much as they will accelerate." In other words, this pandemic is simply going to make the future happen faster. And one of those things is going to be a faster shift to online for higher education. It is untenable for education costs to continue increasing at the pace that they have been.

In this recent Intelligencer interview with Chamath Palihapitiya, he puts forward the idea that medical data might start to be used publicly. Meaning that, after this is all done, we might be willing to give up a certain amount of our personal freedom in exchange for knowing whether we're in a restaurant with someone who is shedding a communicable disease.

And finally, Richard Florida recently published this online talk about how cities can bounce back from COVID-19. In it, he argues that, yes, cities will survive and that it could actually reinforce the "winner-take-all urbanism" that we have already been seeing.

This, of course, is really just the start of the conversation.

The following video was published last week showing the "secondary locations of anonymized mobile devices that were active at a single Ft. Lauderdale beach during spring break." Said differently, the company used anonymized mobile phone data to see where spring breakers went after they left the beach. This was in order to better understand how they may have contributed to the spread of COVID-19. If you can't see the video below, click here.

The video is astonishing for two reasons. One, it shows you the extreme reach of just one beach in South Florida. Imagine if they had analyzed all of the beaches up and down the coast. And two, a lot of you are probably freaked out that this sort of mobile phone data is available to private companies. If you'd like to learn more about how this all works, check out this opinion piece from the New York Times.