In this interview, WeatherSource Vice President Craig Stelmach and our Managing Director George Cambanis discuss weather data usage and WeatherSource Listings on the marketplace.
Enlarged Screen-sharing segments:
George Cambanis
Hi, this is George Cambanis and we're here with Craig from WeatherSource for another data provider showcase. Craig and WeatherSource are very strong data partner that cover environmental and weather data in the Mobito data marketplace. And today we have a great opportunity to speak with a true expert on this field, understand better the market, the industry, and most importantly for today, deep dive into some of the use cases that we have prepared.
And then Craig can share about the usage of weather data in different industries. So Craig, thanks for being here and maybe kicking off the interview with a word on the broader environmental data market. This is of course, a data category that has existed for for quite some years. It's one of the more mature as we see whether these are categories.
has grown to be a, you know, a $14 billion market with a lot of different companies in different industries consuming this data for their own products and services. But today we do see many big trends and many changes into the market that are seeming to pose an even bigger market and generating new use cases of this type of weather and environmental data.
Can you can you walk us through some of the most important such industry trends that you're seeing?
Craig Stelmach
Good to be here and excited about this conversation obviously environment and weather data are a big part of of what's going on in the globe. I think we can look around at anywhere whether it be the excessive heat waves, whether it be the anomalies, weather, the wildfires that we're seeing across the globe.
More and more companies are now starting to pay attention to weather. Everybody has loosely always had a solid understanding of how weather impacts their business. But now that we're starting to see anomalistic weather or departures from normal companies are starting to need to pay even more careful attention to what's going on with the weather and have extremely actionable, and accurate hyperlocal weather information.
So I only see the the need for weather data increasing as we see more and more of these record type weather type events. And then on top of that, add in all of the sustainability initiatives in the ESG mandates. So now you're starting to see actual, you know, businesses whose lending and or success is actually inextricably intertwined with weather.
So a business that is going to build, say, a new development is now needing to convince their lenders that there is not a weather risk for that particular location. And then again, adding on top of that also mandates. So companies saying how are you going to achieve zero carbon output by 2025 or 2030? So we're only seeing weather become more and more prevalent in basically all lines of business, and that could be anywhere from a small mom and pop store that that sees weather really impacting footfall traffic all the way up to the large enterprise clients who are making decisions on a $500 million build for a new manufacturing facility.
All of those are weather are now becoming weather centric versus weather independent. So my my expectation or what I'm seeing in the market is there is a massive increase in demand for weather information to really understand how weather is changing and evolving and what's the evolution of that risk related to weather, particularly as it impacts a business or an asset location?
George Cambanis
Yeah, Yeah. No, that's fascinating. And it's, you know, probably one of the unfortunate developments that weather is gaining in importance and it's becoming ever more anomalous and ever more predictive. But indeed, we're seeing that more and more companies can't but pay very close attention to this and incorporate it in their core business models. And great. So, you know, with this changing landscape, it would be great if you can introduce us to the company itself, Weather source.
Talk to us about perhaps its origin and how it's positioning with its data products in this changing landscape.
Craig Stelmach
So weather source is a marketable different weather company than what many people are used to. Many companies will tell you what the weather is at the beach, but we're going to tell you how many widgets you're going to sell as a beach as to the as a result of the weather that consumers are experiencing.
We also like to say that not all weather data providers are created equal. So what weather source did was our many years of working with weather data. Literally, some of our chief scientist have been working with weather information for 30 years. When we built weather source, we really took all of the rabbit holes and all of the issues with historical weather
And we we use that to basically build a company that provides analytics grade global weather information. And what I mean by that is we bring a continuum of weather information with deep histories that flow seamlessly into the present and seamlessly into the forecast. And all of that data is globally uniform and temporally spatially complete, because our view has always been how can you predict what your business is going to do with forecast alone if you don't have historical weather data to quantify the impact in a historical and historical analysis to be able to then predict the future.
So what weather forecast does is we have global weather information covering every landmass in the world in up to 200 miles offshore. But unlike other providers that rely on singular focal points or weather sensing instruments or weather sensing observations, WeatherSource is ingesting all of the best weather information available, including satellite radar, airport reporting stations, cell tower information, and a tremendous of other weather sensing inputs.
We're bringing those all on to a globally uniform, homogenized global grid. And then from those grid points, very high resolution grid, we're talking five kilometers. We basically then map from these grid points and deliver that data directly down to precise latitude longitude. Now, why that's different and why that's markedly different is historically, many weather companies have relied on singular inputs that could be many miles away from your location of interest with the weather source technology, all of your location of interest are bounded by what we would call virtual weather stations or our end point grid points, which is our core data, our core gridded product.
And again, all of this data is is temporally and spatially, globally complete and with this information is readily served through marketplaces such as mobile, auto, readily accessed and easy to ingest and easy to work with. I can grab many years of historical information, perform a regression analysis, quantify the impact of weather, and then take the output of that regression analysis forward into my predictive model that is now being driven by forecast data, all working from a single source of truth.
So we've done all of the heavy lifting for you to really assemble a petabyte scale database that covers every landmass in the world in up to 200 miles offshore.
George Cambanis
Thanks for sharing. Maybe a follow up, you know, a little bit and almost basic question to to what you just described. You know, I've noted the coverage you mentioned.
I've noted the accuracy that you guys provide. I know the precision by means of which clients can request hyperlocal data and the way in which you get there, Could you could you maybe help us understand which are the the those parameters that help you basically, or rather that make your users choose you? Like there may maybe I don't know if it varies by different company sizes and different company and different industries, but do you see any one of these or a combination of these factors playing a bigger role in the selection of weather data from companies?
Craig Stelmach
Absolutely. When we first started this company, we started this in 2015 and in two years we were literally powering a majority of Fortune companies, many of which had done a pretty exhaustive analysis of benchmarking the accuracy of our data. And what they found is that our data, particularly in areas with high topography or geography or remote locations, was much more actionable than what historically was available.
And a good example of of why our data is is much better is we're a Boston based company. Many providers would be pulling data exclusively from Boston Logan Airport recordings Station. Now, the interesting thing about that station is it's at zero sea level, so it's basically flat to the surface. You've got a massive onshore ocean breeze and then you've got a massive urban heat sink 175 yards away from that airport reporting station.
So I was the weather information at that singular input, actionable for a brick and mortar retailer or a logistics company that might be 20 or 50 miles away. It just isn't. And historically, what providers would do is they would take that information at Boston Logan and use a simple interpolation method to extend it to your location of interest.
And they would call it hyper local. But that interpolation method in many instances does not account for things weather influencing factors such as topography and or geography. So the further you get away from that singular weather sensing input, the higher the degradation of signal quality and accuracy of that data. So a lot of our customers in a good example was we had a customer who came and said, you know, I have have I always have these massive outdoor customer appreciation events and all my customers are taking a look at their app on their phone and it's saying that it's raining.
Well, guess what? At my location, it's actually not raining because they're all drawing from, again, this singular weather sensing input that is located next to an airport is many times located next to a large body of water and or a large city, all of which, again, could have a significant influence on weather. So having our graded data and being surrounded by virtual stations ensures that not only your businesses but your consumers are also having access to data that is properly co-located for that location of interest.
So as we grew this company, we had more and more people who are starting to say, okay, this data is X, it's gap free. There's a deep continuum that from the past to the present. Now let's look at the data quality. So we're doing a tremendous amount of benchmarking of the accuracy of our graded data. And what we're finding is that our data is performing considerably better than most providers who are relying on singular weather sensing inputs.
So it has been so that is really why people are choosing us. They're also recognizing that, you know, many large customers are like, again, how can I just work with forecast data that is not going to tell me it's not going to put contacts behind what is the impact of that weather in the forecast on my consumers without having a deep historical database to quantify the impact in a historical time series and then carry that forward where I can now put context behind what these values in the forecast mean related to my business performance.
So there's a lot of factors that go into why weather source has really grown from a small company to now one of the leading weather providers in the in the world and also, you know, again, we started this in 2015. We grew this company so quickly that in 2019, Pelmorex, which also owns the Weather Network and Altium, owned a lot of other assets, purchased a majority interest in WeatherSource.
Now this is a business that had been around for 30 plus years in Canada. It's one of the most respected brands in Canada and it's got a tremendous longevity in its brand. But they said, who is this company that is serving up this extremely actionable, hyper local and analytics grade weather information? So them making that purchase of weather of a majority interest in weather service was really an accolade to our process in our methodology that is producing that this data that is resonating so well with our business and enterprise customers.
George Cambanis
Yeah, great. No, and definitely the partial acquisition is a great, great testament to what you guys have built and what you have achieved until then. And from our side, we can we can definitely empathize with the multilayer approach that you described. We're seeing a lot of the more successful companies today that are based fundamentally on having a robust data product need a lot of these different data layers such as yourself, including the topography, including the altitude, seeing how all of these different factors can affect weather ultimately and the different weather attributes.
And so, you know, of course, from our side, we we have mostly our lens focused on the mobility space and a lot of the mobility behavior and the mobility activities are, of course, very much influenced by mobility, by by weather. I mean, and it's something that you can see a lot looking at traffic, looking at footfall, looking at even the way in which companies are delivering their services, last mile delivery and so forth.
Weather is, of course, one of the one of the constants that they need to to face and to incorporate and the way they do their business planning. And we are super glad to have had you in the marketplace and to be able to offer to our users and the clients your data sets and the different data products. And can you can you briefly walk us through this collaboration, how you guys are part of the marketplace and what type of data datasets are they, the products someone can access through them on the platform?
Craig Stelmach
Absolutely. And I always like to say that weather data and I've actually got to use case, which we'll be talking about later on, peanut butter sales. But I like to say that weather data in mobility, mobility, meaning the movement of goods, people and or services, logistics, etc., are like peanut butter and jelly. They really go hand in hand because weather is one of the most significant influencers of the movement of people in goods and services.
Obviously, what we just saw in the United States was a good example. With Southwest. We had a lot of storms that were occurring across the United States. There was tremendous travel disruption over the holiday break that just occurred in 2022. So that's just a prime example. But it also relates to things like logistics for supplies. If I have service level commitments where I have to deliver supplies with a certain schedule and I have weather disruption, more than likely I'm not going to meet those service level commitments.
Add in the supply chain disruption. Now I have stores that are not in stock. Now I have distributors who don't have products. Now I have consumers who are not able to find products, sell it. So logistics, whether it be the movement of people, footfall, traffic, etc., or whether plays a part in a role in all of this. And as we said, as we see the increase in anomalies, tick weather increasing not only in frequency duration but severity, you're going to see an even greater impact on the movement and mobility concerns.
And again, across the board, any industry that's focused on the movement of goods, people and or services is going to be impacted by this weather, and it's only going to be amplified as we have increasing degrees of departure from normal. So with respect to the Mobito Data Marketplace, we were super happy to make this a strategic partnership.
But I've been working with George and the team for several years now, really starting to figure out what we wanted to present within the Mobito marketplace. So what we're offering right now is we offer basically broad access to all of our services from the mobile marketplace. You can access up to 20 years of historical weather information in both hourly and daily format.
You can access our forecast products, including both the GFS forecast, which is put out by NOAA and NCEP, or ECMWF which is the best forecast product in the world. We've got all of that available on the Mobito Marketplace. We also have climatology data, which is the mean and standard deviations of weather, very, very powerful tool for really putting context behind whether it's a baseline tool also allows you to identify and quantify the impact of departures from normal.
We also have flooding information. That flooding information is literally at a ten meter resolution. So extremely high fidelity and actionable flooding information. We also air quality and UV data, so we cover the gamut of weather parameters, but then we also have other type of assets like air quality, UV, flooding, etc., that are a little bit out of the norm of what you would consider normal weather.
And when I talk about normal weather, I'm talking about air temp, wind speed, wind direction. So we've got you covered all the way from, you know, air temperature all the way up to wildfires and everything in between. All of that data is available in the Mobito marketplace. We encourage consumers to try before they buy. We stand behind our data, so we offer very, very robust samples.
We're very, very generous testing of that data. And we also provide information and assistance. So if a user was within the Mobito marketplace, wanted to talk to one of our meteorologist, we always will. No problem. Hop on a phone, put you on with a very skilled meteorologist who has dual training. As a data scientist, we can really come in and help you get started with that data and give you some robust samples so you can really start to see what sets weather source apart from other providers.
George Cambanis
Super Yes. And I can also testify to that. And you know, even though a lot of your data products have robust APIs that they'll be self served and indeed you guys are very hands on and super helpful in educating new users and in guiding them through your assumptions, your trial phase and how they can best leverage your data.
And with that, very happy to move to the next phase. My favourite phase and seeing how this data really is put into action with a couple of use cases that you have prepared. So yeah, let's dive right into it. Starting with the use case of how snowfall can impact traffic and the movement of vehicle assets. Super keen to see what you can say around that front.
Craig Stelmach
Perfect. So I've got two use cases are going to cover today. One is the impact of snowfall on traffic patterns up in Canada where our parent organization is. And the second one is the impact of weather data on CPG sales in Florida on a hurricane forecast. Both of these are compelling and I know they're one is obviously directly tied to mobility.
The one is also tied not only to product sales down to the skill level, but it's also talking about footfall traffic because that is an impact on when consumers are coming into the stores in advance of one of these big weather events. So I'll share my screen and I'll go right into that too. It's hope I can do this one sec.
I'm just going to put my slideshow. It's coming up super if you want a full screen and as well. There we go. So this is the first one use case I'm going to talk about. And this is weather's impact on mobility, including the obviously the movement, this use cases around traffic. But as I said, it also can be used for obviously people in retail sales.
I just want to set the stage on this. And as you can see, George, what we had just talked about, what the impact of weather is, I've just got some statistics here where you really talk about speed reductions from 10 to 25% on wet pavement, 30 to 40% with snow, where your slushy movement and as you can see down the line, all of these are pretty significant drivers, particularly when you're talking about very we were still seeing the front page.
Do you see this one now? Yeah. Perfect for marketing. And so what you're going to see here is I've just got some general statistics on the impact of snow on and the movement of traffic, essentially. But what's important to note is that this is amplified.
So these you might see things like a 3% decrease or increase in congestion, etc.. But imagine you're in a metro area like New York or Boston or Toronto or Athens. Once you add in 3% and you're talking millions of people trying to go into one location, that's a pretty big significant impact. And you start to have compounding issues.
So if you have everybody trying to drive in a Boston in the morning and there's a 3% speed reduction that is going to flow down the line to basically everybody trying to get into Boston. Now, somebody who is expecting to be at their office by 9 a.m. is now at their office at 940. So it's a tremendous amount of of of impact.
Basically what you're looking at is a latitude, longitude. And again, all of our data is actionable down to the latitude longitude. We actually do a lot of work with the 407 ETR, which is the private roadway up in Toronto. But as you can see, this is basically what you're looking at on these charts are a Time series from January 12th to January 31st.
There's not a legend on the bottom, but you can imagine January 12th, this is the first date, and January 31st is the last. The traffic patterns that you're looking at, basically the red is going to recognize hour of day. The green is going to recognize basic traffic flow. So normal, normal traffic patterns going through the day, you aren't seeing a decrease in an increase in congestion or a decrease in average speeds.
But now if you look on January 17th, there was a large snowstorm that was there was a lot of accumulated snow. And right at that precise moment where you saw the increase of the snow, you saw a perfectly correlated decrease in the average speed. So you're seeing a pretty significant drop in again, when you see this type of activity, you have to envision that you've got millions of people on the roadway.
So now you're in a situation where you have traffic jams, you have gridlock, you have an increase for accidents. So this dynamic, although it's focused on congestion, changes the entire entire character of a commute. So it's just a simple example of taking our data and combining it with traffic patterns. And as you can see, when you have an increase in snow, particularly snow accumulation, you have a significant accumulation of significant impact of the average speed going down considerably.
George Cambanis
And Craig, is this a highways? Is it the motorways? Do we know what type of streets are being monitored here?
Craig Stelmach
Yeah. So this is basically this is the flow into the northeast side of Toronto. So this is really focused on, again, all of those roads, whether it be highways and say, okay, moving into Toronto. And on this particular day, you saw traffic delays of upwards of 2 to 3 hours.
Now, if I'm somebody who's delivering medical supplies or some other type of very, very sensitive product, I'm now working at a 3 to 4 hour delay to get into Toronto and deliver my goods. So very, very substantial in impact. And again, this could easily be provided to a logistics company who may make a decision, okay, when this snow starting, let me pull over and let me rest my truck or let me rest my driver and wait for that accumulation and versus sitting in gridlock for 4 hours, which as we all know, the more gridlock there is, there is an increase for accident potential also.
So a tremendous amount of information you can glean. And again, this can be applied to whether it be consumers commuting in, whether it be a logistics or a supply company or a delivery such as, you know, home delivery or groceries or Amazon deliveries, etc.. So try to make of sense. And there you can definitely add those to the the traffic planners and that side of things as well.
Looking at the traffic management, looking at the road maintenance companies, looking at the winter maintenance that needs to be done at roads. All of these guys are definitely very, very much affected and dependent on a good understanding of those correlations between weather and traffic and other stuff. Here is a very simple analysis like, you know, we have wind speed and wind direction.
You know, we even provide alerts and notifications when wind speed exceeds 40 miles per hour, which can roll over trucks. So there's a lot of weather information you can do around this with mobility. And this is no different with footfall traffic. So if I had footfall traffic in this particular instance, I could wear this weather information over and I guarantee I would see similar correlations to the movement of people versus the movement of traffic.
George Cambanis
Yeah, makes a lot of sense. Would that be a good time to move on to the second use case that does have the footfall angle to it?
Craig Stelmach
So like I said, weather and mobility goes together like peanut butter and jelly. So this particular use case is around weather and peanut butter sales. It was tied to footfall traffic also.
But I strip that out because it's a little bit busy on the particular screen. But this is basically we have live data coming from some stores in Florida that sell peanut butter. Okay. And what we always understand is that there's a big run up for products and services when you have a hurricane forecast. So I actually have a live demo, which I'm going to show you now as to how consumers respond when there's a forecast of of a hurricane.
You know, up here in the northeast, we like to say when there's a snowstorm or a nor'easter, we run out of toilet paper water in a lot of other consumables. It's across the board. And it's interesting how consumers respond with these big weather events. So I've got a little a little digit here, also a little dialog box that talks about retail sales and weather analytics and really, you know, businesses, weather, applying weather to retail analytics.
We know baseline that it improves sales by up to 2% and grocery stores see even more because people go out to buy consumables in advance of the storm to be able to have enough resources to to last through that storm period, particularly as logistics companies need to go in and restock shelves, etc.. Home improvement chains actually see a gain of 20% before these big weather events.
People are going out to purchase generators, people are going out to purchase other type of consumables, flashlights, batteries, etc. But I'm going to focus this one just on peanut butter sales. This was from 2017. And it's really going to show you how buying patterns change, which again, is also tied to footfall traffic, but how those patterns change as that forecast, as that forecast in hurricane on false.
George Cambanis
And maybe before zooming into that case trend, understand the increase of top line sales that you just mentioned, how companies can use the weather analytics tool to bring forward this effect. And how is that how does that come to place? Is it mostly due to better inventory management predicting the orders that will come in, taking care of the delivery of those orders? What are the the key drivers of this top line increase?
Craig Stelmach
So again, going back to the, you know, the importance of having historical weather information, what I can do with that is I can correlate weather information, not only normal weather, but also the departures from normal and extreme and severe weather. And I can understand what products sell at what volume during these big weather events.
So being able to say, okay, during a hurricane, my peanut butter sales increased 2,000%, that's going to obviously impact some supply in inventory and also product placement. So, you know, if I know that consumers are coming in to purchase road salt or batteries, I'm going to make sure that that is prominently displayed in the store. But I'm also going to try to take advantage of product placement for other products they would purchase in addition.
So if somebody came in and purchased batteries and I found out that 80% of people also purchased a flashlight, I'm going to put those flash right right next to that battery. So it's really to the battery. So generally also optimizing placement in my in my on my shelves of this product, but it's also inventory. And we work with one consumer actually where they just know when there's a big snow event in the south, particularly in the Atlanta area, they literally just drop off pallets of cat litter basically everywhere because cat litter can be used to basically as a to prevent slip and falls and act like an ice melt.
So and also to weight down trucks to put it in the back to add additional weight for rear for rear driven vehicles. So all of this information in an historical sense can really get a solid understanding. It's also product placement in in in your delis so prepared foods if somebody's caught off guard and all of a sudden they're having a big weather event, they might not want to prepare food or so they're going to come into the deli and they're looking for comfort foods and are looking for things to feed their family.
So there's a tremendous amount of information that that can be gleaned from these historical analysis to then make sure that you have the right products on the shelves in the right place. At that moment when consumers are coming in, looking for that for that product.
So what you're going to see, pause it right here is essentially this is in Florida, in in in Georgia. And this is, again, Hurricane Irma. We've got about seven or 4000 stores where we're pulling in live data and it's really down to the peanut butter So we're really talking about peanut butter, which is a CPG. And obviously CPGs are fast moving items that that really are consumed when you have big weather events or people are coming out and looking for durables and other type of of longer lasting consumables.
So what we did was we're pulling in all this weather information and we've got a hurricane flowing in and the hurricane was forecast about 120 hours out. And now what you're going to see is average daily sales was about 200 units during and there was a normal ebb and flow of sales and that was consistent. But now you're going to see what happens upon that hurricane forecast.
So now what I'm going to set the stage here is in the upper left hand corner. You basically have store sales and you're going to see a lot of blue dots that are going to be more pronounced as sales increase. And the right hand pane, you have the store levels in this graph represents actual peanut butter sales by day.
And then you have a slide bar which really talks about the days of the week as this hurricane was forecast and as it rolls into land mass. And what you're going to see is as the hurricane starts moving in, what you're going to see in center here, the sales are going to increase such that they were selling 2000 units per day when average normal sales, 200.
And then what you're going to see is you're going to see sales stop as the hurricane moves in, because all of these stores were out of peanut butter. So, George, to your point about inventory management, if I were to take a look at this and I know my sales are increasing 2,000%, I'm going to advance stage inventory so that I can meet this demand.
And imagine if my company has 200,000 SKUs of products. This is literally one SKU for just one or two states of my total sales. So you can understand the level of impact that these big weather events have on product sales. So now I'll just play the video and you're going to see this and I'll stop and provide a little bit of context behind it.
So now you're seeing the normal flow of sales during the day, and now you're going to start seeing the hurricane forecast move in. So we're seeing a normal, normal sales volume day in and day out. And you can see, like I said, things lighting up here and now we're moving into. So now I've got my hurricane starting to come in.
That's 120 hours out. So you're going to start to see these volumes increase exponentially. So as it gets closer now, now you're starting to really see in the southern part of Florida, people are going out and buying peanut butter. So now moving into this hurricane forecast, now I'm 96 hours out. I'm seeing a tremendous amount of volume as this hurricane starts to roll in.
Now we're moving into 72 hours out and now I'm seeing my buying volume increase considerably. These are major drivers. So this right here, I mean, we're talking millions and millions of dollars on this one SKU alone. So now is that a hurricane gets closer? Now we're going to be moving to about 58 hours out or sorry, 48 hours out.
And now, as you can see in Orlando, I've got a tremendous amount of buying activity. And we're talking, you know, upwards of 2000 units versus 200 continue to let this roll. And now we're 48 hours from that hurricane forecast. Buying activity is increasing considerably and as you can see, it's pretty much across the board. But it's really also focused on where that where that hurricane was forecasted to to hit.
And now in the hurricane, it's just coming in now. And now you're going to see where it gets interesting. And again, back to that inventory discussion we had, why it's so important to understand what at what what what products to have on the shelves. So as that hurricane hits now, you're starting to see all sales stop in the southern part of Florida.
There is no more peanut butter. Okay. And you're starting to now see the increase of buying activity going up into Georgia because that hurricane's moving into Georgia. John, I will continue to play this out. Again, you have no hurricane out now. You're looking you literally have no peanut butter in pretty much all of Florida. And now you're starting to see Georgia hurricane or peanut butter activity pick up because they're about to receive the hurricane or the hurricane's about to move into Georgia.
So now as we move in there now, there are 24 hours out. All of the peanut butter. But now you see a tremendous amount of peanut butter sales. But there is no peanut butter in Florida now after the hurricane moves through and we're talking two days beyond that, you start to see sales popping up in the southern part because now they're starting to restock the shelves.
So it's just a good example of the impact of something like a hurricane or a big weather event on product sales and how that can really drive, you know, how that can really only just change the assumptions, right? How that can really drive sales, increase and decrease sales, and then also inventory optimization and placement.
George Cambanis
This is a great use case. Thanks for sharing. So simple, so impactful. And you know, all of us have close memories of panic buying during COVID as well. You mentioned the toilet paper. As I'm sure you know, many, many of us have memories of stores running out early on in days when people thought they're going to be spending a lot of days locked in.
So, yeah, that's that's definitely that's definitely super interesting. And the real like the graphics of the hurricane of the forecast of the hurricane coming in and then the actual hurricane following that was a very nice illustration.
Craig Stelmach
We did a lot of run of it. And it's really interesting if you take a look at footfall traffic in mobility patterns pre-COVID and then you layer in COVID, it's extreme will be interesting to see how patterns changed. I mean, we've got footfall, traffic views of many metropolitan areas. There was no footfall traffic. You went from a New York City, a billion people moving around a day. You literally take a snapshot of that a week later. There's nobody moving on the streets. So it's really interesting how COVID not only changed mobility, but also how it impacted changes of consumer behavior, as we saw a shift from, you know, consumers going out and buying products to everything being delivered to homes, consumers not going into local stores, everything again, being driven by, driven by Amazon, etc. We've also analyzed and we have access to around COVID and we're doing a lot of work with our retailers because a lot of their business has changed considerably during COVID. And now as they kind of regroup now, but there's even what's called pent up consumer demand. So right after COVID restrictions started lessening, you started to then just see massive movements of people and goods and services because everybody had been locked down for a period of time and now everybody wanted to get out and move. So all of that's interesting and and the interesting part of that is post-COVID. Weather had less of an influence on the mobility of people in footfall traffic, again, because people didn't care. They just wanted to get out of the house. So it's really interesting to do those analyzes and work with things like mobility data combined with weather data, combined with footfall traffic data and product sales data.
George Cambanis
Exactly. And once again, it's a matter of having as many layers with some explanatory power in order to approach these questions and approach these problems of, you know, how are people spending, where are they moving, what times of the days that they choosing to do their different things? And yeah, there's really not a golden answer to these things, but you really need to get the right context at the right time in order to approximate that correct answer.
Super great. Maybe as a last question, given that you are, you know, spearheading a lot of the best efforts when the weather soars, it would be good to, you know, thinking about the data economy, the data markets and those data products will be good to hear from you. Some of the challenges that you're facing and go into marketing, selling those products and interacting with your customers.
Craig Stelmach
Yeah, it's been a it's been a really interesting journey. I mean, anybody who's worked in data, what we've seen is really the first words coming out, big data, everybody, businesses started attention to data. Everybody wondered what big data meant. So and as we as we adopted the word big data, you started to see transformations in businesses. You started seeing CIOs titles changed to CDO, you started changing IT, professionals changing to data and analytics.
You start to actually see committed data and analytics teams. So so what we have seen is, you know, a massive movement in the past five years of businesses using data and really starting to become data heavy and using that data to make business decisions versus. Just my gut. A good example is retailers historically would take a look at last year and say, okay, I'm going to forecast the same product sales that I had in Q4 last year because I'm expecting similar sales.
Well, guess what? What if last year Q4 wasn't a novelistic year and you basically you know, in this year was stacking up to be the next Q4 was stacking up to be considerably different. Yeah. How is my gut in that instinct. A non data driven decision going to help me meet my revenue targets? So you're starting to see more and more people adopt data.
What our challenges have been and WeatherSource in other alternative data providers is many companies believe I've lived without data or whether data for 40 years or 20 years or ten years. Why do I need it now? There's a perception that there's publicly available weather data available. Third is that they're going to find signal with the weather data.
So we sell against multiple perceptions and it's really convincing key stakeholders in large companies or in demonstrating like with the CPG instance I gave you, where I showed you how weather is really impacting their business. So any data provider who's selling data, that's that's niche data like weather data and or certain types of financial data, etc., or even mobility data had challenges initially really try to penetrate that market and getting companies to commit to that spend without a tangible ROI tied to that data.
So that was some of the challenges and it's really changing perceptions as to making business decisions based on my gut and previous performance versus using data to really create actionable business intelligence. Now the good news is what we've seen from the introduction of the word big data until now is a very transformational change. So now you're starting to see companies really start to embrace data and it's becoming a key aspect.
So obviously challenges continue to be, you know, we need at WeatherSource, we need to be constantly innovating, making sure we're leveraging the best technologies, whether it be a lot of the new satellites coming out of some of these smaller providers, whether it be leveraging additional sensors, the Iot piece of the world being able to harvest data from app, from apps like the exhaust data or being able to harvest data again from Iot and being able to put that data in a usable format that's going to then provide that value in that value.
Add an ROI for those ADD users. So I think our challenges in this industry are going to continue to be really educating people on the power of data and how you can become a data driven organization. You can still have a level of gut, but you know, being able to at least take a look at different scenarios and engage in scenario planning with data is in.
So our real challenge is education of our of our prospects and our customers. As to the if possible with data go, that's great. You know, that's very, very interesting. You know, we see a lot of similar things across different data categories. I think, as you said, you know, primarily this has to do with the fact that a lot of these markets are indeed nascent markets.
People are only now learning how to use these data and they're even building their organizational structure and hiring the right roles to be able to process time to utilize this data. And we've been seeing roles such as data acquisition managers coming up for the first time showing that a lot of this maturity is indeed taking place quite fast.
But, you know, I think it's it's a one way street and there's not really coming back on. You know, what we're seeing is that basically competition is bringing in a lot of this pressure to companies. You know, if you're a great human company and you're super smart of how you're allocating your fleet in a city, you really cannot someone else who's not using data really cannot compete with you.
And and how, when and how fast you're going to be delivering a service to different people and yeah no that's that has been very very interesting thank you for for the call today and sharing all of this useful information from your own business perspective and looking forward to growing the business and discovering more new use cases together. Thank you, George.