by Steve Isaac, Content Marketing Producer, Carto
With McKinsey estimating that the Internet of Things (IoT) has the potential to make an economic impact of $3.9 trillion to $11.1 trillion a year by 2025, IoT has evolved from a buzzword to a reality that businesses can’t afford to ignore.
IoT — or the linking of the physical world with the digital one — is fundamentally related to Location Intelligence (from sensors monitoring traffic to indoor mapping). So it’s no surprise that IoT will lead to major improvements and developments in the smart city, retail, and real estate industries.
Here are 3 IoT and location intelligence trends to keep an eye out for this year:
Trend 1: Smarter Cities with Less Traffic
As cities are becoming “smarter,” local governments are increasingly relying on location-of-things technology to help their citizens find everything from parking to leisure facilities. However, traffic congestion remains the bane of every city dweller’s existence, therefore offering an opportunity for tech companies.
Open data projects such as SFMTA’s Bike Ridership Data program are using sensors and predictive analytics to meet mobility challenges. Public-private partnerships are combining crowdsourced data (location intelligence) and IoT data streams to create traffic solutions that anticipate gridlock, offer alternate routes, decrease emergency response time, and even reduce air pollution to improve city health.
The smart city movement is sure to keep expanding with Navigant Research predicting that the global city revenue will grow from $36.8 billion in 2016 to $88.7 billion in 2025.
See how the most innovative cities are using geospatial technology to create citizen-centric smart cities at CARTO Location New York!
Trend 2: Personalisation of the Retail Experience
IoT has already made retail supply chain management more effective and efficient, but with sensors and smart beacon technologies, retailers can now tailor the shopping experience with greater accuracy than ever before.
Imagine walking into your favourite store and receiving an alert with a coupon for an often-bought product. Or pulling up an indoor map of the store and being led right to the products on your shopping list.
75% of retail and wholesale companies recently polled by Forbes ranked Location Intelligence (LI) as either “critical” or “very important” to ongoing revenue growth strategies.
Consumer demand for a seamless experience has been steadily growing, and LI and IoT technology are providing retailers a chance to catch up to customers’ omni-channel expectations.
Trend 3: Using Psychographic Data in Commercial Real Estate
Never before has LI offered commercial real estate (CRE) such as hyper-local demographic and psychographic information for optimal site selection. When opening a physical store, businesses can now minimise risk and maximise their competitive advantage by analysing psychographic data to figure out where certain products or stores are likely to be more popular.
Although somewhat of a controversial topic, psychographic information will only be more available in the future. According to IBM’s Marketing Cloud report for example, 90% of data available today was produced in the last two years.
Even after being aggregated and anonymised to meet modern privacy and security standards, new data points collected from crowdsourcing, IoT, mobile data, and semantic technology will make it easier than ever for businesses to figure out local customer attitudes before investing in real estate.
Related: Here’s What Location Intelligence Can Do for These 4 Business Sectors
What’s Next?
Armed with developments in connected technology and hyper location-specific data, businesses will continue to implement sophisticated strategies in 2018. Whether it’s incorporating geospatial technology in smart cities, geomarketing in the retail industry, or data conveying local dispositions in the CRE market, the combined technology of IoT and location intelligence is reshaping the way industries are thinking about the importance of location.
Read this: 40 Brilliant Examples of Smart City Projects Which Uses Open Data
Article first appeared on the Carto blog.
Lava is an authorised Partner of Carto in Malaysia, a location intelligence software that analyses and visualizes complex and large amounts of data. With more than a decade of experience in the industry, we’re proud to say we’re one of the leading cloud solutions providers and consultants in the Asia Pacific region.