We look back on Unfolded’s success in the past year and focus forward to see what’s next.
Today marks the one-year anniversary of Foursquare’s acquisition of Unfolded, a geospatial technology company with an advanced platform for spatial analytics and visualization. We acquired Unfolded with the goal of becoming a single source powerhouse of location data, enabling users to seamlessly analyze and visualize data in order to drive business results. Now one year later, we are doing just that and more.
The data dream team
A match made in geospatial heaven, it is now easier than ever to get started with Foursquare data. Since joining forces with Foursquare, the Unfolded team is able to continue building and developing its innovative geospatial technology, but with the added support of Foursquare data and customers. Samples of Foursquare data are available in the Unfolded Data Catalog and can be added to an interactive map with the click of a button. This means customers have both the Unfolded platform and Foursquare data in one place for quick analysis and visualization.
The results prove this to be a winning partnership as well – both the number of Unfolded Studio users and number of maps created in the platform nearly doubled since Foursquare’s acquisition. Social channels additionally skyrocketed, with the Unfolded Slack community in particular growing by about 50%.
The partnership also aligns with our vision of Foursquare Everywhere. We believe that location and geospatial technology are the foundational building blocks for virtually every business today and joining forces with Unfolded has only expedited our company goals.
Our customers approve
Customers continue to express how the Unfolded platform brings data to life, and are eager to engage in discussions about how the platform has improved their businesses. In particular, they are able to more vividly illustrate the power of data through visualization, conduct on-the-fly analytics, explore spatiotemporal data, and increase data enrichment capabilities.
Since the acquisition, we have worked closely with our customers to help them understand and use the Unfolded Platform in order to derive impactful business insights from Foursquare data. As a result, we’re able to build more focused, vertical solutions in the Unfolded platform and turn their data into actionable information.
In particular, many Foursquare customers in the retail space use the Unfolded platform for more traditional data science use cases, such as site selection and market analysis, to learn more about their business and plan their next move.
Launching Hex Tiles
We can’t discuss Unfolded without highlighting Hex Tiles: the next generation tiling system that we launched back in February. Hex Tiles enables large-scale spatial data to be prepped and ready for analytics in minutes, and all within a single browser through the Unfolded platform.
The Hex Tiles technology is ideally suited for Foursquare’s big location datasets as it is designed to handle large-scale geospatial data visualization and analytics. The launch of Hex Tiles was a huge milestone for both the Unfolded platform and the Foursquare team at large, embodying our drive to push boundaries in the world of geospatial technology.
What’s next for Unfolded
We never stop. As business needs and technology continue to change, Foursquare follows suit. We are making continuous improvements to Unfolded, as well as to our other products, in order to make datasets even more beneficial to the customer and user-friendly.
Currently, we’re exploring ways to integrate Unfolded with other Foursquare data and analytics in order to provide a single unified portal and experience. To start, we are providing an integrated documentation portal to better align Foursquare and Unfolded’s developer offerings. This means that new developer offerings will be integrated with both the Unfolded platform and Hex Tiles from the start.
Big geospatial data is hard to work with, but that’s where we see an opportunity. Now, one year into our partnership with Unfolded, we are better positioned than ever before to create the data platform for businesses, by empowering them to conduct effortless analytics on multiple data sources.
Learn more about Unfolded and get started with Hex Tiles today by contacting us for a demo.
You can try Hex Tiles for free by logging in to Unfolded Studio to access the new Hex Tile datasets in the Data Catalog.
Be sure to also register for our upcoming webinar here on June 28th to hear the latest on Hex Tiles.
