The Need For Speed: How to tackle the challenge of delivering real-time data fast?

When it comes to data visualisation solutions, speed of rendering is business critical.

Although it’s rarely a case of “now or never”, the ability of any data visualisation system to work in real time is becoming increasingly a must-have for brands, events & operational teams.

Reason 1: Humans, by nature, are impatient – they want answers quickly.

Solving data-driven problems frequently requires multiple steps. One answer leads to the next question.

Waiting hours, days, or weeks for a system to crunch a big data set was acceptable – a few years ago. But with relentless march of new technology, not today.

You need a solution that can give you instant answers to questions in real-time.

Technology and human behaviour need to go hand in hand.

Reason 2: It’s crucial for businesses to partner with vendors who can process big data efficiently.

Why? Because it’s business critical.

You can’t afford a system to halt, you can’t take shortcuts which might undermine the validity of the output. This could affect your reporting and your actions.

A clunky, poorly-architected system often can’t process the vast amounts of data required. You’re stuck.

No insights. No answers. No actions.

A vendor who can process data efficiently will help you not only excelling your operations, but also increase user & customer experience.

What does “real-time data” mean and how can you deliver it?

To be actionable, you need your solution provider to deliver visualisations in milliseconds.

Let’s say you want to monitor the interaction of the crowd with your venue.

There is no point knowing about a line forming or an incident occurring after the event.

The data is only relevant as long as it’s delivered fast. You need the data as it is happening, in real time.

How we help you solve the problem?

When we set out to build the Colocator location intelligence platform we faced 3 challenges:

1. We needed to harvest location data updates, but then apply algorithms to fuse GPS positions, WiFi signal strength, Bluetooth signal strengths and inter-phone signal strengths.

2. We then needed to find a solution to store these massive and complex trajectory data sets to allow our clients to query and return the data in less than a second.

3. Off the shelf big data technologies like Hadoop weren’t fit for purpose, so we had to come up with our own data-store solutions.

The results of this:

We worked with the best of breed tools that enabled us to scale data storage almost infinitely while still retaining the ability to query all that location data interactively and incredibly fast.

With the technology in place, we are equipped to help you deliver real-time visualisation as the real-world event happens, but also subsequently for post event evaluation and analytics.

You are able to answer questions to the “Who was there? How many were there? For how long? Where did they come from? Where are they going to?”

Customer profiling with cutting edge technology - and all this at the lightning speed, instantly, in real time.

Learn how about the Colocator platform here.