News Coverage Analysis(2/27)
City of Urbana-Champaign and UIUC are inseparable. We live in literally a "campus town”, which campus and students play an essential role in the community. Choosing a better city is a big factor for potential students from outside of the city, but residents can’t choose students.
How a local citizen, especially local small business owners benefit from the existence of student and university?
Data points:
- Public transportation
└MTD/Veoride/Uber/Safedrive
- Local business
└Food track/Grocery store/Movie theatre
- For the local business owners, seasonality for students on campus is often a big issue. This particularly applies if the business is for end-users such as restaurants, groceries, clothes.
- However, temporarily closing business in Summer vacation period leads to opportunity loss and less attractive community services.
- More customers prefer purchasing online and online service might be one solution, but small business owners find themselves difficult to maintain an online presence, due to limited human/technical resources.
→Is there any way to match students’ resource to help small business owners making online presence?
Tier 1 Search
[Source]
1.Challenges local business owners face for online presence
These days, an online presence is essential for business success, but in a small business, where owners are required to wear many hats, a company’s online presence may not get the time it truly deserves.
2.UIUC graduate’s local restaurant case
However, setting up a growing business on a college campus did have its setbacks for its growth. This is especially true with college students only on campus for a certain period of time.
- Dependency on the functionality of tracks(generator).
- Lack of need for multiple food tracks on campus
3.The art Theater launches $25,000 fundraising campaign to remain open
The single screen cinema states that they need to raise the funds "immediately to remain open".
Sharing economy could help.
4.VeoRide set to bring out new bikes, with scooters a possibility
VeoRide set to bring out new bikes, with scooters a possibility
5.but also some challenges...
Some companies launched in cities without permission, others have gone out of business and some cities have seen piles of the bikes littered about. VeoRide has expanded to about 17 different college campuses, with this being its largest deployment, Thomas said.
Tier 2 Search
- Visualization of stats about prevalent products sold at the market is worth analyzing.
- Jewelry rank as top, but the result shown in the data seemed counter-intuitive to me, considering the number of students in the community.
Who gather data? Who decides granularity?
Apparently, there are some overlaps in data. (jewelry and accessory, apples and fruit)
Apparently, there are some overlaps in data. (jewelry and accessory, apples and fruit)
- Also, we lack important data about “who” bought the products.
- What kind of decision can we make from this data?
- The following map is a map of market vendors in the city of Urbana. Do we see a correlation between proximity to the campus and vulnerability to the school semester?
Source:
