Improving Omnichannel Sales through Geospatial Analytics

Have seen and developed geospatial analytics for single and groups of locations.  Typically for the case of adding stores.  But this is different and quite intriguing.   An examination of Omnichannel that includes the aspect of geospatial specific data.    Now can we include the likely process (journey?) of such consumers?   And is that further useful?

 Supercharging retail sales through geospatial analytics in McKinsey

A retailer can now use geospatial analytics to understand the interactions between its online and offline channels. With these insights, it can create a higher-performing retail network.

By Rob Hearne, Alana Podreciks, Nathan Uhlenbrock, and Kelly Ungerman

A retailer can now use geospatial analytics to understand the interactions between its online and offline channels. With these insights, it can create a higher-performing retail network.
Is our outlet store in San Francisco hurting foot traffic and sales at our full-price store two miles away? Or is it doing the opposite—attracting new customers and making them more likely to visit both stores? How are our five Manhattan stores affecting our e-commerce revenue? Are they making consumers more likely to shop on our website or to search for our products on Amazon? If we open a new mall store in the Dallas metro area, what impact will it have on sales at our existing stores, at our department-store partners, and online?

The answers to these kinds of questions are increasingly crucial to a retailer’s success, as more and more consumers become omnichannel shoppers. Guessing wrong can lead to lost sales and expensive real-estate-investment mistakes. Yet most retailers don’t give adequate thought to the cross-channel impact of their stores. They rely on gut feel or on high-level analysis of aggregated sales data to gauge how their offline and online channels interact with each other, and they assume that cross-channel dynamics are the same in every market—when, in fact, every single customer touchpoint affects the rest of the retail network in its own unique way, depending on a vast range of factors. .... "

Geographic Optimization with Bayesian Networks

Had not seen this kind of optimization before with Bayesian Networks.  Webinar leads you through the process, largely non-technical.

 ... By Stefan Conrady, 
Managing Partner at Bayesia USA & Singapore: Bayesian Networks for Research, Analytics, and Reasoning .... 

Geographic Optimization with Bayesian Networks and BayesiaLab
You may not know that you can use BayesiaLab for geographic optimization. Today's webinar explained how you can find an optimal location for a distribution hub that needs to connect thousands of geographically dispersed suppliers and customers. Bayesian networks and BayesiaLab make this type of optimization remarkably quick and easy. ...  "

Mapbox Intelligent Geospatial

 Yes, can see this as a considerable leverage point.  That companies like Twitter and Google are already reaping.   Discussion in Linkedin.

With Mapbox Deal, IBM Watson Will Learn A Lot More About Where Things Are Happening
The geodata provider will help IBM let non-techies track things like sales, real estate values, and citizen complaints by address.

The catchphrase "artificial intelligence" may be ubiquitous, but it's hard to find people who actually know how to use it. That discrepancy represents an opportunity for products like Watson Analytics, IBM's point-and-click AI tool that lets non-experts analyze business data by asking questions in colloquial speech. In recent years, IBM has been building out the data sources that Watson Analytics can draw from—and is now adding granular mapping info through a deal with geodata provider Mapbox.

Watson Analytics is not the sexiest form of AI—pretty far from Ex Machina. But it's attractive to people in fields like marketing, who can start with as little as a spreadsheet of sales figures and get artificial insights into how and where they might sell more product. (Single user accounts range from free to $80 per month.) Since announcing Watson Analytics in September 2014, IBM has been adding built-in data sources that customers can pair with their uploads. In March, 2015, it announced a deal with Twitter to let Watson Analytics users study online chatter. That same month, IBM also made a deal for detailed meteorological data from The Weather Company (owner of The Weather Channel and Weather Underground)—including moving its data to IBM's cloud. A few months later, IBM purchased The Weather Company, a deal that closed in January 2016. ... " 

Connected Volcanoes

Volcanoes have been linked to sensors for a long time.    And connected to the internet as well.   I like the new connections to advanced analytics,  Data is not yet available.   I plan to connect to this volcano.   In Adage:

GE Creates World's First 'Connected Volcano'
Hooks Up Sensors to Nicaraguan Volcano; Shares on Social Media  By Kate Maddox

Digital industrial company GE, which has been at the forefront of using new technologies to tell its story, is creating the world's first "connected volcano" and sharing the journey on social media.
GE's sensors will capture data from an active volcano.

To do this, GE is partnering with explorer Sam Cossman at Qwake, a company that combines global expeditions with cutting-edge technology. GE is the digital and software partner for an expedition Mr. Cossman is leading in Nicaragua to connect sensors to a live volcano in order to gather data for early warning systems and other purposes.

"We are leveraging Predix, GE's industrial internet software, to help build the foundation of a digital ecosystem Mr. Cossman and his team at Qwake are putting in place at the volcano," said Sydney Williams, global digital marketing manager at GE. ... " 

Bluemix Supports Hangout Analytics

Nice to see some now sevices in Bluemix Cloud that support real time stream analytics.  This is notably of interest to applications like Retail.   Updates in their blog give some detailed outlines and descriptions of analysis value.  Possibility of use with Beacons, Supply chain decisions, IOT and others.   Ultimately this looks at the dynamics of all sorts of geospatial data.

" ... Hangout is a concept in geospatial analysis where an entity is said to be hanging out or in a hangout if it has been dwelling in the same region for a specified period of time.  Once an entity (for example, a smartphone or a vehicle) has been in a region longer than a specified dwell time, it is considered to be hanging out in that region.  You can use hangout detection in a variety of mobile device and Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios, including:

Marketing: Offering real-time promotions to people who remain in a particular area for a significant period of time.

Intelligence: Are two ships passing in the night, or are they hanging out together, possibly indicating some nefarious activity?

Transportation: Has a vehicle in your fleet made its stops at the anticipated locations?  ...  "

CartoDB Expanding Tools

Recall using some visualzations developed with CartoDB.   Easy to use.   Now there are many more credible competitors in the GEO visualization space.   About constructing value from location. In GigaOM.  " ... CartoDB raises $23M to expand its data visualization tools ... " 

Limitations of Geospatial Analytics

In Datamag:   Really some very classic issues about the limitations of long term forecasting in general.  

" ... From a statistical analysis standpoint, modeling natural disasters as black swan risk-mitigation scenarios is better than modeling them as events that can be predicted, much less averted, with any degree of actionable precision. For example, earthquakes remain the classic example of these kinds of catastrophes: they can’t be predicted with confidence, but their impact can be mitigated through various proactive measures. That risk profile also describes the threats that regions face from many meteorological events. In such scenarios, impacted regions are often little more than sitting ducks whose best hope is to mitigate the severity of the inevitable effects. ... " 

Memories are Geotagged

In KurzweilAI:   Memories may be geotagged with spatial information about the location where the information was acquired.   Applications to retail engagement?  Is this just in games?  Quite a remarkable finding on the surface of it.   The ultimately associative memory?   " ... “These findings provide the first direct neural evidence for the idea that the human memory system tags memories with information about where and when they were formed and that the act of recall involves the reinstatement of these tags,” said Michael Kahana, professor of psychology in Penn’s School of Arts and Sciences. ... " 

Panoramio Redesign

The Google Operating System reports that the image locating service Panoramio has been redesigned to make it look like a Google Maps extension.  It was acquired by Google in 2007 and contains millions of photos.   The image display size has been increased and the interface simpler.  It makes a lot of sense to integrate images with their location on a geographic map.  I am still surprised that this method appears to be too little known.  It's like crowd sourcing location photography.  I was able to make several 'discoveries' with it.   The new connection will likely make it better appreciated.  Will the Google Maps API allow the pictures to be used? Had thought of doing a mash up based on that, but the effort never went forward.  See also the Panoramio blog for more about the changes.

Release of Geodata

The Geodata from Wikimedia is being released.   Thought this had been done before,  very useful for mobile. " ... The WikiMedia Foundation has added a new extension to MediaWiki, the foundation for Wikipedia, that adds geographic data for individual wiki articles. Aimed primarily at mobile users, GeoData will make finding information about your present location easy and fun. According to WikiMedia, GeoData aims to codify the common practice of adding geographic data to articles.... "