19 September, 2019

What's location intelligence? Let us show you.

The Liveli team showed this years Google Cloud Summit attendees in Sydney exactly how location intelligence works. By using data collected from WIFI signals on smart phones, Liveli was able to show live indoor foot traffic data on a map of the conference floor.

The Google Cloud Summit attracts around 3,000 people each year and we thought it would be the perfect place to demonstrate the wonderful insights you can glean with location data by combining the power of Maps and Cloud. 

How we did it


Ingesting the data

Our team created IoT sensors using Raspberry Pi’s. The sensors send back the aggregated data of the number of devices near the sensors back through to Google’s IoT Core Gateway service (the entry way into Google Cloud).

IoT Gateways are a powerful feature of Cloud IoT Core that bridges communication between constrained devices and Cloud IoT Core. For example, devices that have computational limitations (limited memory) or protocol limitations (can only communicate via Bluetooth or LoRa) can still leverage the capabilities of Cloud IoT Core and the rest of Google Cloud for processing, analysing, and visualising data in real time.

The IoT Core Gateway allows you to securely connect, manage and ingest data from millions of globally dispersed devices. This is Google's way of authorising what data it’s ingesting.

The data is then being passed to Cloud Pub/Sub. Google Cloud Pub/Sub is a fully managed service that provides a staging location for ingesting event data (stream or batch) on its journey towards processing, storage and analysis. Pub/Sub automatically scales to meet demand.

Processing the data 

To process the data, we use Cloud DataFlow, the service for transforming data in real time and scaling it as required. Cloud Dataflow seamlessly integrates with Google Cloud Platform services for data ingestion (Cloud Pub/Sub) and data warehousing (BigQuery).

Storing the data - Data Warehousing

We stored the live Google Cloud Summit location data we were collecting with BigQuery. BigQuery is Google’s fully managed, petabyte scale, low cost analytics data warehouse.

Analysing the data 

We presented the real time and aggregated data analytics gathered from the Raspberry Pi devices in Data Studio, Google’s dashboard tool that allows you to create branded interactive reports with data visualisations from different data sources, in this case BigQuery.

But we also really wanted to showcase our spatial capability by rendering the location data on a heatmap.  We georeferenced the conference centre floor plan over a Google Map of the International Convention Centre in Sydney. We know it makes sense to show data with a location component on a map.

What we do
Indoor tracking is just one use case for location intelligence - but for us, the story is in the data. Businesses hold enormous amount of location data and are sometimes unaware of it or have so much that they are unsure of what to do with it. At Liveli, we have the knowledge and expertise to help you process and visualise your data in a meaningful way to make faster and more accurate business decisions.
 

Watch the demo for yourself 


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