Any time we order a latte at the coffee shop, tap our phones to ride transit, or hail a car through a ride-sharing app, we are creating data. Isolated, these bits of information are useless. But the aggregation of millions of these tiny data points can paint an incredibly detailed picture of what people need and want, and when and where they want it. That is the core of location data analytics. Unleashing its power, and placing it in the hands of organisations, is Quadrant’s mission.
To explore the power and promise of location data, the Quadrant team hosted its first meetup of 2019 with the presentation “Better Data, Better Tomorrow” at its headquarters in Singapore. During the two-hour event, our CEO Mike Davie and Big Data & Blockchain Engineer Sharique Azam shared their insights on how location data analytics work, offering some real-world use cases of its vast potential across industries.
In case you missed it, we have selected some highlights of the event here.
You can watch the Facebook Live broadcast here. If you want to stay updated about our upcoming events, subscribe to our newsletter and join our Telegram community.
Better data, better insights
Mike started off the evening by recalling one of the first lessons he learned launching DataStreamX, the first high-quality real-time data platform, and working with thousands of data buyers and sellers.
“What we found when transacting all these data between organizations was that the data space is murky. As soon as you start making money off data … there are always people trying to find out how to game the system,”
Mike Davie, CEO of Quadrant
DataStreamX went from transacting 5 billion data records per month in June 2017 to 57 billion processed in November 2018, as Mike explained. But there were still important problems to solve. How do you avoid having different data sellers putting the same datasets on the platform? How do you protect the integrity of data feeds? How do you ensure data has not been tampered with or altered? What was needed was a solution to trace the authenticity of every bit of data. Because the insights of any data analysis are only as good as the data that feed the analysis.
The answers to these questions are the genesis of Quadrant. We recognised the potential of the blockchain to verify and map data in a way that was not previously possible, offering solutions to the problems described above. That’s how Quadrant was born. Launched last year, our protocol is capable of verifying and mapping disparate data sets to bring transparency and trust to the data industry.
Why location data?
Why has Quadrant decided to focus on location data? As Mike told the audience, this sort of information, if properly gathered and analysed, offers the power to enhance services, address challenges and plan the future in almost every industry, from healthcare services to retailers to telecoms. Location data is produced all the time by each of the billions of mobile devices active globally, offering an enormous pool of data from which to draw insights. Its potential is almost limitless, and Quadrant is the tool that can unlock it.
Mike cited one of the most visible companies on earth in explaining the uses of location data, which include identifying new consumer and market segments, designing effective marketing strategies, improving customer service and managing risks. McDonald’s the global fast food chain, was able to judge the effectiveness of every billboard promoting the Big Mac’s anniversary. It did this by analysing the pattern of people driving by the ad and seeing how many of them subsequently ordered a hamburger.
“Before location data analytics, we were just guessing,”
Mike Davie
Better Data, Better Tomorrow
The final presentation of the night was given by Quadrant’s Big Data and Blockchain Engineer Sharique Azam. Sharique provided a case study that offers an example of how Quadrant’s data platform functions and provides benefits in the real world. The customer in this case needed authentic, high-quality location data for their products and services. However, this was easier said than done. In order to achieve this goal, the customer needed to ensure the provenance and veracity of all the data it used, and to do this with information at a large enough scale to make the resulting insights meaningful.
Sharique then moved on to explain how Quadrant works for customers, walking through an overview and demonstrating a few steps for data stamping and verification on the Quadrant platform. If you have not done so already, we invite you to take a look through the presentation for detailed technical information via the facebook live video.
Sharique’s presentation demonstrated, through a case study, how Quadrant has expanded its capabilities and how it is able to meet the needs of customers. The technical analysis provided a more detailed explanation of the nuts and bolts of the Quadrant platform. Sharique drew a clear line from where we started, through how Quadrant has grown and matured as a technical offering for enterprises, to where we are headed as the leading platform for data analysis and authenticity.
The First of Many
Overall, it was a positive event that underscored and highlighted the ways Quadrant is building a leading data platform for enterprise customers. We want to thank everyone who attended the meetup and invite anyone who couldn’t make it to have a look through our video recap and the event presentation. If you weren’t able to make it, don’t worry — we have the presentation material available for download here.
We will be holding more events in the future. We hope to see you at upcoming events.
This post was originally posted on Quadrant's official Medium account on 22 January 2019
