City of Las Cruces economic development office has posted a free app that it says will allow local business owners to compare their business to a database of other businesses.
The City of Las Cruces offers a free online tool designed to help businesses grow by making smarter decisions through data analysis. SizeUp for Local Business Intelligence (SizeUp LBI) allows you to easily obtain highly specific data on revenues, salaries, health insurance costs, suppliers, competitor information and much more.
This is an indication that tools for “learning” can be provided from anywhere in the cloud, and begs the question of what roles governments can play to support learning, in non traditional ways. The Feds, for example, have huge amounts of data and reports…what if they posted a Big Data analysis front end app? Maybe they already have.
Information wants to be free, and it wants to be learned, and it doesn’t naturally stay in silos of traditional uses, but finds a way to be distributed through innovation. Learning is analyzed information, curated information, and it can arrive from unexpected sources.
Maybe SizeUp LBI is wonderful, but I tried looking up “video production” for Las Cruces, and there were no returns from the search and I know that isn’t accurate.
Then tried the demographic module, and it did bring back a LOT of demographic information (for a radius of 5 miles from our PSA headquarters.) This included education levels of populace. Did you know Las Cruces largest education attainment pool is Graduate Degree at 20%? Can that be true?
Maybe if one adds in outside the city and DAC the numbers would be different. Maybe I’ll go check that now.
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Checked the same radius of 5 miles for “Consumer Expenditures”…lots of numbers. Some of which seemed plausible.
Then for “Shelter” there’s an average cost for rentals, and the number listed is almost 3K. That couldn’t be an annual amount, could it, which would be less than 300 per month.
And way too much to be an average monthly rent in LC, AFAIK. Having accurate information is pretty much the whole point of this kind of data, no? Maybe I missed something.