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
The percentage of single-person households in the US has been steadily increasing since the 1960’s (though the rate of increase has moderated in recent decades). As of last year (2018), 28% of Americans lived alone, according to the US Census Bureau. So about 1 in… Read More
This morning BILD and Altus Group released their January 2019 new home sales figures for the Greater Toronto Area. Here are the highlights: 1,362 new homes sold in January 2019 across the GTA. This is up 14% compared to last January. Of these, 942 (~69%)… Read More
In 2011, Apple owned 584 acres of land. As of this year, and according to the Financial Times, the company now owns about 7,376 acres. Apple uses its “facilities and land for corporate functions, R&D and data centres.” The latter would include server farms for its… Read More
Earlier this week I deleted my Facebook account. If we were friends on the service and you can no longer find me, this is the reason why. Part of why I did this certainly had to do with privacy. I read Brian Acton’s (WhatsApp cofounder)… 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
Last Thursday the Supreme Court of Canada announced it would not hear an appeal from the Toronto Real Estate Board regarding a 2016 Competition Bureau decision aimed at giving consumers greater online access to information, such as historical (home) sale prices. I am not at… Read More
I discovered a company yesterday called CARMERA, which just raised a $20 million Series B funding round. They call themselves a “real-time, street-level intelligence platform” and their flagship product, called Autonomous Map, provides HD maps and real-time navigation data to autonomous vehicles. That’s the way AVs… Read More
Yesterday Urbanation released its Q2-2018 rental report for the Greater Toronto Area. It tracks both purpose-built rentals and condominium rentals, the latter being condominium units that are listed for rent on MLS. The average condo rent, for all unit types across the GTA, is up 11.2%… Read More
Last week the US Census Bureau released its 2017 population estimates for the largest cities in the country. All of the figures are for the city itself and not the broader MSA or some other boundary. Here are the top 15 cities with the largest… Read More
