PredictHQ Quarterly Release – April 2024
Welcome to our April 2024 Quarterly Product Release! Every three months, PredictHQ pulls together the latest product and feature advancements to ensure you’re getting the most value out of our AI-powered platform. You can find previous releases on our Resources page. This April, our new releases include:
Watch the on-demand webinar where PredictHQ Product Manager Andrei Bizovi walks through each of these new releases and shares how to use them to get the most out of our data.
Along with the above releases, we have two additional updates to highlight this quarter:
Additional updates
1. Changes to our geographic area handling
Geographic area handling provides a way to define the limits of geographic areas like cities, states, and countries. We use this to determine which events fall within a geographic area. For example, if you search for events in an area like London, Chicago, California, or Berlin, our system is tasked with accurately matching events to their geographic area.
Geonames refers to a global geographical database that provides standardized information about locations worldwide. This data includes details such as:
Place names in various languages
Latitude and longitude coordinates
Population figures
Administrative divisions (e.g., state, province)
PredictHQ exposes Geonames information through our Places API, in the Events API place filter, in the Events API response exposed through the place_hierarchies field) and in various other APIs that use place IDs. Place IDs in our system are equivalent to the Geonames IDs in Geonames.org. See our Geolocation Guides for more information.
PredictHQ leverages Geonames locations to provision access to geographic areas like cities, states, and countries.
Previously, our Geonames data was resulting in some of the searches on areas like cities not returning as many events as they should. We have updated our data to use an up-to-date version of the Geonames data from 2024. Due to significant improvements in our platform, the intention is to perform more frequent updates of this data going forward
How this impacts the PredictHQ user experience
After the update there will be the following changes:
Data returned in the
place_hierarchiesfield in the Events API will be changed for many and will more accurately reflect the location the event is scoped to.The geographic scoping of place IDs (the
place_hierarchiesthey correspond to) will be updated and be more accurateWhen you filter using the place field in the Events API or other APIs it will return more accurate results for events in those locations
The
place_hierarchiesdata returnedSome legacy place IDs from Geonames have been removed. From our analysis, these are not place IDs that customers are using and the customer impact is low.
Data returned through Snowflake and ADX will also be updated.
Overall from our analysis of usage of how customers use Place IDs, we think the overall customer impact is low. Please contact us if you have any concerns or see any issues.
Note that this change is being deployed on the 30th of April 2024 NZST.
2. Improved coverage for small events in the US
Major events aren't the only ones that impact your business. Smaller events, often overlooked, can bring significant local spending. Take the Brewha Bushwhack in Arkansas for example – with under 500 attendees, it boasts a Local Rank of 100. This means it's a major draw for the area, despite its size.
That's why, in January, we extended our pipeline to implement new providers to ingest more events at smaller locations, doubling our coverage of attended events under 1,000 attendees. Now, we're thrilled to announce this expansion covers all 50 US states!
This means you now have access to an additional 654,500 unique events across all 50 states in our system – a potential reach of over 103 million attendees! With more events being ingested every day. That’s part of PredictHQ’s overall database of 31 million events.
The types of events that this update covers include:
Small time artist concerts
DJ events and parties
Annual local historical days and fairs
Bands and live music at bar venues
Church and other community camps
Pub quiz and open mic nights
Ready to experience the difference? Log in to your PredictHQ account now and explore the power of our improved event coverage.
