You likely heard the news about a 12,000 person reduction in employees and the closing of some 600 stores. (Seattle Times) Florida and California will be most impacted; they've been hard hit by the economy and credit crisis. Also, "About 200 of those will be directly operated by Starbucks, with the rest managed by other companies like bookstores and airport concession firms."
I try to make sense of the "too close together" aspect of this story from the land of Dunkin Donuts. Here in my city we hold a large 4 mile race on Thanksgiving. The course passes four Dunkin Donuts and that's far from all the ones we have! We have, to my knowledge, just two Starbucks. Dunkin Donuts, either by design or luck, doesn't seem to have the cannibalism problem. I have a hunch about that.
It's my sense that Dunkin Donuts is far more about "take out." The stores here are notoriously near bus stops and many have parking lots of key commuting routes. Besides, when was the last time you spent much time in a Dunkin Donuts? Starbucks, while it does have a good take out business (which is why I find the closing airport Starbucks odd), is about that mythical third place, the one that's not home or work. It's business is centered around "hanging out in a nice place." Dunkin Donuts surely is not (our local stores often have a sign stating how long patrons may stay - typically 20-30 minutes). If that's all true, it seems you'd travel less for a take out coffee/donut, than for a "sit and enjoy" environment of Starbucks. It seems Starbucks was not thinking that way and taking advantage of human behavior.
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15 items tagged "Intelligence and Location"
All Points Blog
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Starbucks Closing Stores; Some too close together
Posted: July 2nd, 2008, 1:35pm CEST
Tags: Location Intelligence
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Attention Shoppers! Where You Walk May Influence the Price you Pay
Posted: July 1st, 2008, 2:06pm CEST
Tags: Location Intelligence
Mapping the floor of a retail store has been discussed for many years. I've discussed this before in an article as have others. Now comes word about Path Intelligence, a company that tracks the movement of consumers without having them wear any special device or equipment. The company's FootPath technology consists of installing a small number of monitoring devices within stores that detects cell phone signals from shoppers and locate them to within 1-2 meters. The technology is being used to help retailers to determine staffing levels within stores or by mall developers to help them determine rental rates.
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Location Intelligence and the Impact of Higher Fuel Costs and Housing Foreclosures
Posted: June 24th, 2008, 6:39pm CEST
Tags: Location Intelligence
In an era of high gasoline prices that is influencing driving habits and where fallout from the mortgage lending debacle has impacted housing decisions, businesses and consumers alike are becoming more "location aware." So how does this affect the geospatial market? What data is likely to be needed by those seeking to reduce personal expenditures and alter bad driving habits?
Continue reading "Location Intelligence and the Impact of Higher Fuel Costs and Housing Foreclosures" -
Rolta Looking to Buy US BI Firm
Posted: May 28th, 2008, 1:59pm CEST
Tags: Location Intelligence
In the latest of too many articles, the Indian press notes a potential Rolta by in business intelligence, though its expertise is in geospatial technologies. It acquired Orion Technologies last year. Does this have implications for location intelligence?
- The Economic Times -
Spatial Databases Spark Debate
Posted: May 23rd, 2008, 6:05am CEST
Tags: Location Intelligence
I participated on a panel at the Pitney Bowes MapWorld conference on what was to be a discussion of the trends on Location Intelligence. But the panel quickly turned the discussion toward a rather lengthy dialog on spatial databases and whether the kinds of transaction limitations in Oracle Spatial or MS SQL Server warrant putting ALL geospatial data into the database.
Continue reading "Spatial Databases Spark Debate" -
Salesforce.com: User Interface as a Service?
Posted: May 7th, 2008, 2:51pm CEST
Tags: Location Intelligence
That's it's latest offering. Mashable explores it and it's a bit more than that - more like Yahoo! Pipes to me. If you want a map on your app you add a single tag to create it an pop it onto the dashboard.
Most interesting is Adam Ostrow's take on Salesforce.com, an actual company that makes actual money, in contrast to the many, well free toys.
Is it just me, or do the announcements we hear from Salesforce seem to just make a lot more sense than a lot of the tie-ups we hear about on the consumer side of the Web? Last month, the company announced a deal with Google to launch Salesforce for Google Apps, and from what Ive seen in my brief tour of Visualforce, were about to see a lot of really useful applications being cranked out by developers in the Salesforce community. It certainly adds more credence to the theory that Facebook apps are just for fun.
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Top Ten Things I learned at LI 2008
Posted: May 5th, 2008, 9:00am CEST
Tags: Location Intelligence 2008
10. Location-based marketing, for trade shows at least, can passively capture information otherwise missed from standard lead management systems. The use of active RFID tags and ultra wideband sensors can capture the who and how long of people that are standing in front of your booth on a trade show floor and you dont even have to talk to them. The Ubisense/Fish Software demonstration of RFID provided a context for better understanding the use of sensor technology where before I could only read about it.
Continue reading "Top Ten Things I learned at LI 2008" -
Quote of the Day: "Mashups have done more for this industry..."
Posted: May 5th, 2008, 8:15am CEST
Tags: Location Intelligence 2008
At LI 2008, Dr. Robert Uleman of IBM suggested that "Mashups have done more for this industry than two decades of sending out products into the world."
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Quote of the Day: "GIS should be invisible..."
Posted: May 5th, 2008, 8:10am CEST
Tags: Location Intelligence 2008
At LI 2008, Berk Charlton of Pitney Bowes Group 1 suggested that "GIS should be invisible." Going further to illustrate his point about how the success of location technology will be underscored when "people don't know that GIS has been done to them."
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Location & Intelligence
Posted: April 24th, 2008, 8:17pm CEST
Tags: Location Intelligence
On the eve of our 5th Location Intelligence Conference I find myself looking around at who else has picked up using the term "location intelligence" to either describe what their product does or what business they think they are in. At a recent conference someone asked me and others on a panel for a definition. Having registered the URL years ago, I begged off on answering. I'd rather not confine the term to anything I or someone else says it is. It's a little like GIS these days...perhaps more buzz than something tangible. As it is, I count may companies adopting the phrase for just that reason. They don't want to be saddled with explaning the term GIS and propose using the phrase because it is more understandable, which was part of the reason I settled on the term in the first place.
However, it's being spread a little thin. Wavemarket, a mobile LBS provider, has adopted the term as has Pitney Bowes MapInfo, one of the original desktop mappers. geoVue, Oracle, DMTI Spatial, and others have all emphasized the use of the term in their own way. I believe it was DMTI that offered the definition in Wikipedia. Mark Smith, CEO/CTO at Ventana Research offers a definition for his BI clients around which they have an established LI practice. So, from LBS to GIS to BI, the usage of LI has been somewhat stretched.
But to me, that's fine. In cultivating the adoption of 'location intelligence' as a more cogent moniker about which hangs some better understanding of location-based applications, that's exactly how I had hoped the conference would evolve. In it's fifth year, LI has certainly grown to provide a venue where an eclectix mix of ideas and technologies can come together. -
More on Google Maps and WebFOCUS for Business Intelligence Apps from IBI
Posted: April 2nd, 2008, 5:21pm CEST
Tags: Location Intelligence
I followed up with Jake Freivald, VP of Information Builders (IBI) on their announcement that the company was utilizing the Google Maps API to visualize geospatial data (see image at right courtesy of IBI). I wanted to know what led IBI to implement this feature in its WebFOCUS platform. "We needed to do for a variety of reasons," said Freivald. "What we are coding with latest iteration of WebFOCUS is to make it a platform for mashups. All you have to do with WebFOCUS is decide what data you want; what icons you want and what other drill downs you want to go to. Its not a lengthy development cycle and we want to make good on the promises of Web 2.0."
IBI is not abandoning its relationship with ESRI or its tools, for which it had developed a interface to share and analyze data and pass back results to IBIs business intelligence suite. In fact, IBI is just trying to deliver a less costly alternative.
"Customers love the idea of maps but dont want to invest that much in mapping," said Freivald. "So we have a lot of customers who want maps but dont want to spend a lot on it." Customers will still be able to easily to transfer data to ESRI when client wants to do it for more advanced analysis. -
IBI Taps Google Maps for WebFOCUS Solution
Posted: March 31st, 2008, 5:30pm CEST
Tags: Location Intelligence
Information Builders (IBI) is announcing the availablity of WebFOCUS for Google Maps and looks to catapult itself to the forefront of business intelligence (BI) tools that are location enabled. IBI is touting the ability to rapidly develop a mashup of its BI engine with Google Maps to visualize a business' operational data and reports. This is somewhat of a departure for IBI which had looked to ESRI's ArcIMS as their platform for geospatial data visualization.
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Location-based IRS Audits; The IRS is Watching Where You Live
Posted: March 31st, 2008, 8:44am CEST
Tags: Location Intelligence
Last Saturday, on the CNN show "Your $$$$$$" with Ali Velshi, a guest mentioned that you are more likely to be audited if your income doesn't necessarily jive with your zip code. For example, if you are making well under the "statistical" minimum for your zip code, you have a greater chance of being audited. In general, the IRS audited 7% more returns last year. So, perhaps we are seeing a more "location intelligent" IRS.
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Did the Media Go Far Enough in Mapping Super Tuesday?
Posted: February 6th, 2008, 4:26pm CET
Tags: Location Intelligence
I loved table-sized monitor where TV news anchors pointed and illustrated location-based phenomenon during Tuesday night's "Super Tuesday" primary election coverage. But for my taste they didn't go far enough. They certainly drilled down to the county level to show polling results but never explained why, other than to say that one candidate did better in the urban areas of big cities, etc. Good reporting but not enough.
For example, while Mike Huckabee was winning southern states, the reason was ostensibly that he carried the evangelical vote. But you can't just explain it away with a wave of the arms. Show me that the majority of polling places were held at Baptist Churches, if that was the case or that the demographic composition of the populace was of a certain religious denomination. I want detail; I want facts. And that information is available. I expect this level of coverage will come eventually. For the average viewer some might think that too much information. However, I'd like to see the media apply psychographics to their analysis as well. I want to see if the "American Diversity" demographic went for McCain and the "Affluent Suburbia" went for Romney; did "Struggling Societies" go for Clinton, and "Urban Essence" go for Obama? (See the Mosaic psychographic profiles for explanation of these classifications) I haven't seen it yet, but it will come.
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Microsoft-the leading BI vendor?
Posted: February 6th, 2008, 3:50pm CET
Tags: Location Intelligence
In a recent Gartner report, Microsoft ranks as the top business intelligence (BI) vendor outpacing COGNOS, Business Objects and Microstrategy, according to an article in InformationWeek. The report cites Microsoft's bundling of products and price as the main attractiveness of the company's BI offering in addition to its software quality.
As a review, note that several acquisitions in the BI space have occurred recently. Within the last year, Oracle bought Hyperion; SAP bought Business Objects, and IBM bought COGNOS; and in 2006 Microsoft bought ProClarity. The InformationWeek article suggests that BI is being commoditized or entering the mainstream, which ever way your want to characterize it.
Now, to the point about location intelligence. Oracle is already introducing Oracle location-based solutions into its BI products and not just resting on the fact that it is in a dominant position in supporting GIS application. Yesterday, I got a demo from SAP about how they are integrating mapping tools with CRM as part of their Sagres project. In the past, the BI vendors have acknowledged location is important to visualizing business data relationships but never indulged the applications except with arms-length agreements with MapInfo or ESRI.
Now things are changing. As BI players are acquired by larger IT companies and location technology remains in the forefront of the big players, (I cite the release of spatial datatype support by Microsoft in SQL Server 2008 and SAP's continued development of Sagres as an example of this), location technology too will finally reach BI applications in a much more visible way. What will be interesting to see is how these companies demo their BI solutions. If they put spatial analysis as their leading show-stopper for customers, the days of GIS as a technology relegated to the guy making maps in the backroom are over.