Location Intelligence

Did you miss “Man vs. Machine” at this year’s Restaurant Leadership Conference? In case you did, we’ve put this video recap together, filled with golden nuggets from the industry’s best. That includes leaders from INRIX, Restaurant Magic, Epson, and SiteZeus.

Retail e-commerce is one of the biggest revenue making sectors of the enterprise and if you don’t know that already take a quick look at Alibaba and Amazon. Online shopping is yet another sector that is slowly and surely being transformed by AI and scientific breakthroughs have opened the doors for vast amounts of data to be leveraged in the retail market. This big data makes it possible to have AI powered interactions with customers that involve product recommendation, customized searches and even personal assistance.

Called the “Sexiest job of the year” by the Harvard Business Review and listed as the number-one best job in America on Glassdoor’s most desirable jobs list for 2016, data scientists are here and in high demand. The postings for such job positions on hiring sites like LinkedIn read like a who’s-who of CPG and QSR: Starbucks, Arby’s, General Mills, Miller Coors, Kohl’s, Macys, and the list goes on.

This has been an eventful first quarter for SiteZeus, and we’ve added a handful of new features, data bundles, and nuances to the Synergy platform. Below you’ll find a handful of these premium additions:

Join us at this year’s Restaurant Leadership Conference, on April 10th at 2:15pm – Grand Sonoran C. We’ll be kicking off the conference at our breakout session, where Tyler Carlson, VP of Sales at SiteZeus, will be running a panel session with Keenan Baldwin, Co-CEO & Co-Founder of SiteZeus, Steven Roberts Founder & President of Restaurant Magic, and Kevin Foreman GM for GeoAnalytics with INRIX, Inc. We’ll be taking a deeper dive into the challenges facing the restaurant industry…

What’s a heuristic? In layman’s terms, it’s judging a book by its cover. It’s when you decide on something based on limited information, just like Pavlov’s dog salivating when it hears a bell. As humans, we use this approach constantly because it’s incredibly efficient. Instead of watching an entire movie, we first look at the trailer. Before eating an entire meal, we first look at the menu. And when choosing retail locations, we simply glance at ten or so factors, make a call, and call it a day.

Cutting-edge technology and brick-and-mortar retailers have never gotten along perfectly. The relationship is complicated, but it can be incredibly harmonious — despite the knee-jerk opposition of many retailers to things like online shopping, mobile apps, bluetooth beacons, and now big data. Business owners who reject these ideas are often left behind as the natural selection of capitalism demands better, smarter, and cheaper strategies. But what about those who embrace these revolutionary technologies? This is where we see an elegant integration of ancient and modern, providing customers with the best of both worlds: the familiarity and convenience of brick-and-mortar retail, enhanced by the actionable and dynamic insights provided by machine learning.

While technology seems to shrink objects over time, it super-sizes their performance. Once room-sized, computers have now folded up into our briefcases. Telephones have dwindled into tiny pocket-sized mirrors. And business intelligence analytics? Analytics have been shrunk, packaged, and made affordable to even the most spendthrift sole-proprietors…

Inspired by the coastal Mexican lifestyle to bring authentic, energetic and passionately prepared dishes to their own neck of the woods, the Gardner’s have made a splash with Costa Vida. With handmade tortillas, slow-cooked meat and all-natural ingredients, it’s no surprise that over 75 locations have opened across the country since 2003.

As a real estate broker, knowing when to use data is tough. How much should you rely on what the demographics tell you? Or how much weight should you place on the painfully obvious vagrancy problem when you drive through the trade area?

Are site expansion targets an illusion? It’s hard to say precisely how many multi-unit retailers fall behind on their 10, 20, 50, or 100-unit growth targets each year, but it’s probably fair to say that it’s quite a lot. All savvy business owners set a high bar for themselves and yet no matter how diligently they run the numbers, development always seems to lag 25-50% behind of what’s expected. Why is this?

Undeniable – the commercial real estate industry is painfully slow to adapt to new technology! I have witnessed hundreds of companies refer to an excel document as a sophisticated piece of “technology.” The major drivers for this lag in innovation revolve around an outdated rationale and a general lack of forward thinking. The idea that value can only be extracted from hard assets or tangible assets is being challenged now more than ever.