Geotime is a cool technology from research and now into products from a company called Oculus. It allows you to combine the three major ingredients of most Business Intelligence data collection and analysis - Data, Time and Geography!
Here's an excellent video of what you can do with these three ingredients and how you can get the bigger picture and also how, when it moved, where!
This is a demo of how Geotime is used to analyze the spread of the H1N1 (Swine Flu) Virus around the globe. What is striking is also analyzing the spread of the disease by correlating it with Flight Data that carried infected passengers!
Here's another example of how this kind of analysis is used for analyzing Hurricanes in the 2005 season in the US and their impact:
What this means for businesses is that they can analyze their Sales Data or Financial Data or any other data that is of interest in combination with Geography and Time, providing very keen insights that you would otherwise not see. For example, these are the kinds of analyses you could perform:
a. How did the Sales of Toyota Prius's take off globally since its debut? Which countries and which regions within those countries took to this vehicle and how did it happen over time?
b. Where did we get visitors from for our Online Store from? What days, time of day where they logging in from? Who bought and who browsed?
There may be many more interesting kinds of analyses you could perform when you combine large volumes of data with geography information and time. Things get very insightful when you start combining other information also to see correlations!
Very exciting, and impressive use of Visualization and how large volumes of data can be made to yield insights that you would otherwise not get!
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