Why Now?

Recently, an article was published by The Atlantic entitled The New Tech Helping Retailers Pick the Right Spot, by John Cantwell.  The article provided an overview of unified market knowledge systems (UMKS) in the context of retail real estate and site selection.  I had the pleasure of letting Mr. Cantwell test drive the TAS Online component of TAS Unity (our UMKS) to help him write his article.   While a tad short on technical detail due to word limitations and the target audience, the article at least scratched the surface of what happens when analysts, business people, and field users are all connected together to a knowledge-base about their markets, stores, and competition.

The fact is that there is nothing drastically new about the concept of connecting people together so they can fix and interact with data, information, and knowledge about their markets.  We at Trade Area Systems have been doing it for retail real estate for a number of years.  ESRI makes all the pieces so you can put your own system together to achieve your goals and has had them for a while.

In fact, an interesting comment posted on The Atlantic article page by Will Hinton, a web technology expert with a background in GIS shows that this kind of thing has been going on for a long time.  The gist of Will’s point was that there isn’t really anything new about UMKS.  Will actually put one together back in the late 1990s.  I couldn’t argue with him.  Clearly there has been technology that would allow desktop and online users to share data for years.  The mobile component was problematic until recently but, at least since air-cards were available, you could always use a laptop with a GPS device and then have a digital camera from which you would load pictures to the laptop before uploading to the central knowledge-base.  So why all the interest now?

The conclusion that Will and I reached together is that it is the iPad that has made the difference.  It is not that new technology has finally allowed UMKS to be possible.  It‘s that new technology has allowed people to be inspired to see what is possible.  When someone walks onto a potential site, pulls out their iPad, uses the built-in GPS to find their exact location, runs demographics in seconds, concludes that the site is of interest, adds the site to a potential sites database, fills out a form about the site that is also added to the database, takes pictures with the iPad camera that are attached to the site and has all this information immediately available to everyone in the company, for some reason the power of these systems becomes apparent.  It’s not that you couldn’t do this before.  It just wasn’t so darned easy.

Whatever, the reason, people are really coming to understand the power of unified market knowledge systems.  And that makes it an exciting time to be in this business.  If the iPad is the catalyst that made it happen, all I can say is “Thank you Steve Jobs!”