A recent study and research paper by the MIT Senseable City Lab — called, Tasty Data — has discovered that restaurant data alone can be used to accurately predict location-based factors such as daytime population, nighttime population, number of businesses, and overall consumer spending within… Read More
Economists at Facebook, Harvard, Princeton and NYU recently analyzed anonymous Facebook data in order to study our social connectedness. The New York Times’ Upshot wrote about it here and it is a must read. There are a number of interesting takeaways from the study. One… Read More
“A NEW commodity spawns a lucrative, fast-growing industry, prompting antitrust regulators to step in to restrain those who control its flow. A century ago, the resource in question was oil. Now similar concerns are being raised by the giants that deal in data, the oil… Read More
Here is an eye-opening article from data scientist Vicki Boykis outlining the number of ways in which Facebook collects data about its users. It’s called: What should you think about when using Facebook? One of the more surprising tidbits from Boykis’ article is that Facebook… Read More
Last year, social media company Foursquare predicted that Chipotle would see a ~30% drop in its Q1 2016 sales. It knew this because the geo-location data from people using its app (check-ins and passive visits) was also down. They had figured out the relationship between… Read More
Uber just announced that it will be providing access to the (anonymized) traffic flow data generated from its over 2 billion rides. This new product is called Uber Movement and the goal is to help cities make better infrastructure decisions. Because indirectly, that also benefits… Read More
I have written about Foursquare a number of times over the years (here and here) and I continue to be a regular user. I am intrigued by all of the location-based data that they collect through their apps. Below is a recent Recode Decode (podcast)… Read More
This week Strong Towns has been running a great social media campaign called #BuildHereNow. The way it works is very simple. They asked people to get outside and take photos of vacant and/or underutilized properties in their town or city and post them to Twitter… Read More
Whenever I read studies that cite census data, I’m often left feeling like the data is out-of-date. Five years – which is how often Canada conducts its national census – is a long time. Somebody could move to this country for school, complete a 4-year… Read More
I am a fan and long time user of Foursquare – now known as both Foursquare and Swarm. Foursquare has struggled against competitors such as Yelp.com when it comes to local business recommendations. And I have less than 100 friends on my Swarm. It doesn’t… Read More
BRANDON DONNELLY 