“For years, our financial clients, even the really techy ones like hedge funds and quants and data scientists–they struggled with geospatial data because it was static, because it wasn’t tagged to a company, because it didn’t have history tagged to it,” Shackelton says. The map would remain a tool for doing primary research and for investor presentations, but Shackelton realized that the geospatial data could have a greater impact if it wasn’t tied to the map.
The solution, it turns out, was separating the geospatial data from the map. Who cares?’”īloomberg’s MAP GO app lets users visualize the impact of real-world events, such as a tropical storm (Source: Bloomberg) “This is the exciting nature of maps, but it’s also the challenge that I faced when people say ‘Hey, it’s just a map. “They go in, they explore the map, and then they go off and look and research the company a bit more,” Shackelton tells Datanami. The typical geospatial workflow would start off with a client going into MAP GO to create a map for an investor presentation, or to come up with a novel idea to trade on. That was the dilemma that Shackelton struggled with–how to make the geospatial data more actionable than just displaying it in a map. They are great at delivering a snapshot of the world in a top-down view, but that doesn’t necessarily translate into decision-making bliss. But maps–even digital ones that are constantly updated like MAP GO–are relatively static things. Maps, after all, are elegant devices for delivering useful information. If you happen to be a map buff, then the application was fun and exciting. That offering, called MAP GO, quietly debuted about two years ago.Īs its name suggest, MAP GO features a map. So Shackelton, who helped set up radar installations in the Air Force before building geospatial data solutions at what would become S&P Global Market Intelligence, set out to build a full-stack mapping solution for the Bloomberg Terminal.
But aside from a few niche cases like that, there really wasn’t much going on with geospatial data at Bloomberg. When US Air Force veteran Bobby Shackelton arrived at Bloomberg about five years ago, he found some pretty basic uses of geospatial data in the Bloomberg Terminal, that all-important source of news and data relied upon by thousands of individuals who make their living trading on information.įor example, commodity traders used geospatial data to understand the number of oil tankers under sail in the ocean at any point in time, which describes the short-term supply of that crucial commodity. Increasingly, that edge is coming in the form of geospatial data that describes the movement of people and goods – as well as natural events like hurricanes and viral pandemics - through space and time. Stockbrokers and other Wall Street professionals who use Bloomberg terminals are always on the lookout for an edge.