Kinetica

Foursquare just announced they’re giving away their place data for FREE. WHAT? Here’s why that’s a genius move and why I'm excited about what it means for the location industry. Foursquare was one of the only truly global point-of-interest datasets apart from OpenStreetMap. OSM was inferior to Foursquare in coverage, attributes, and recency. I used to buy Foursquare for that reason. Now... you can use that data for free and commercially! What does this mean? 1. This is a huge win for Open Data, Developers and Foursquare. 2. Location data is becoming a commodity to compete with Google. 3. AI makes it much easier to keep track of the world and pushes the value of point-of-interest data to ZERO We'll see this newly released data quickly getting used for Geocoding, Search, and Maps and anyone with spatial data in a data warehouse will start using it without the upfront cost being a barrier to experimenting. So WHY is Foursquare doing this? It's a very ballsy and forward-thinking move. They are building a global operating system where humans and agents can contribute their knowledge of place data. Becoming the place where everyone maintains this commodity will be very valuable. In location data POIs were the last frontier where you couldn't access data for free. Buildings used to be hard to get -> Microsoft building footprints. Addresses used to be hard to get -> OpenAddresses. Validated roads and other data was hard to get -> Overture. But POIs were always hard to get cause maintaining them in OpenStreetMap is near impossible. This also marks now a time where nearly every major company has adopted OpenData as part of their location strategy vs. maintaining a strictly private data asset. In 2014 Mapbox, in 2018 Facebook, Microsoft in 2023 TomTom and in 2024 now Foursquare. Congratulations to Foursquare and I'm excited to contribute and build with it!

📣 We are excited to announce the beta launch of Foursquare's Geospatial Intelligence Platform! Be one of the first to explore our latest platform, designed to make geospatial insights accessible for everyone—from experts to novice users. Get on the waitlist today to try our new Geospatial Intelligence Platform! 🔗 Link in comments below 👇

Another exciting update from Foursquare!!! Today, we are launching the 'Foursquare Geospatial Intelligence Platform' (in beta) - a breakthrough solution that transforms how enterprises leverage location data to drive business decisions. In an industry where geospatial solutions predominantly cater to data scientists with deep domain expertise, we've taken a fundamentally different approach. Our platform empowers data analysts to harness sophisticated location intelligence through an intuitive SQL interface, bringing geospatial insights closer to business decision-makers.   The Foursquare Geospatial Intelligence Platform achieves this through three foundational pillars: - FSQ Graph (Data):  Unlike traditional data catalogs that leave the complex task of connecting datasets to users, our innovative data backbone pre-integrates Foursquare's foundational datasets, Places & Movements, with essential public datasets (roads, buildings, census, weather) and provides tools to seamlessly connect customer-owned data through standardized H3 cells and FSQ Place IDs. This unified foundation eliminates months of complex data engineering typically required for geospatial analysis. - FSQ DB (Compute):  In partnership with Kinetica, we've developed a GPU-accelerated geospatial compute layer that goes beyond simple spatial joins. Our solution packages sophisticated spatio-temporal and graph algorithms that operate on Foursquare Graph data out-of-the-box, making advanced analytics like trade area analysis and customer segmentation accessible through standard SQL. This enables analysts to perform complex location intelligence tasks without specialized programming expertise. - FSQ Studio(Visualization): Our enterprise workspace combines interactive SQL workbooks with real-time visualization capabilities. Analysts can explore data through familiar SQL queries and instantly see results as dynamic maps, powered by unique capabilities we added on top of industry-standard open-source frameworks: Kepler.gl and deck.gl. This seamless integration of query environment and visualization accelerates the journey from raw data to actionable insights.   To learn more about our journey & approach to democratizing geospatial analytics, read our detailed blog post and join the waitlist for early access: https://lnkd.in/gQa8diwc