The company formerly known as CartoDB announced today that it is rebranding to the name CARTO. This change is intended to indicate a stronger focus on enabling location intelligence and analytics within its platform by adding new tool designed to allow data analysts to analyze, visualize, and publish without the in-depth knowledge of SQL, CSS, and Javascript that has been traditionally required to to perform such tasks.
While the existing features of the platform that have been popular with
application developers will still be there, I am intrigued by this new direction. The idea of introducing a visual grammar and widgets to enable drag-and-drop analytics and visualization within the browser could fill a gap that’s really not been completely filled since the 2012 acquisition of GeoIQ. The market is ripe for a concise, tight online analytical platform that still enables open access to it underlying data an APIs.
The platform will consist of complementary components; Builder and Engine. Engine is the next evolution of what CartoDB users have gotten to know, while Builder will be where the analyst-centric visual tools will reside. You can request early access to Builder now.
Given the design and usability pedigree of CARTO and Vizzuality, I am excited to see what they accomplish with modern web tools. This a team that has consistently hit home runs with focused applications. I can’t wait to see how they approach a more general-purpose platform user experience.
Congratulations to the CARTO team on this exciting new chapter.
