DigitalGlobe is a fascinating company. According to their website:
DigitalGlobe owns and operates the most agile and sophisticated constellation of high-resolution commercial earth imaging satellites. Add to that our aerial program offering wall-to-wall coverage of the U.S. and Western Europe.
DigitalGlobe's imagery has mostly been used to study the physical world. Their primary applications include identifying natural resources, understanding the earth’s environmental condition, responding to emergencies and natural disasters and studying crop or land conditions.
But they've expanded their product line to include investment analysis. They recently did a study of parking lot traffic patterns at Walmart stores across the U.S. and found that traffic to the stores increased modestly in October.
According to their analysis traffic fell in both August and September, so October showed a positive turnaround (and yes, the pun was intentional if not good).
**Update - Walmart reported a revenue turnaround in Q3 as predicted by DigitialGlobe**
This is a great example of how Big Data and related analytics are fundamentally changing business and how we work.
It's also an example of how actual data is replacing surveys and other forms of market research. In the old days (say 5 years ago), to understand traffic patterns at Walmart a research firm would sent people to a subset of Walmart stores to count cars. Using this subset they would've projected traffic for the entire chain.
This approach has a number of drawbacks relative to using satellite imagery. It's slower, more expensive and prone to errors (do you really think those folks kept an accurate count of cars over the course of a couple of days?).
The rise of the cloud and Big Data is leading to many situations where actual data is replacing surveys, government data and other forms collected market research data for use in analytical applications.
We see this in our own work. We are increasingly analysing actual data related to small businesses instead of survey data. Payroll and financial data are good examples. Intuit now provides both aggregate actuals for both data types and we use this data instead of government data.
The shift to Big Data-based actual data is a trend that will continue to grow.
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