Fredericton Company Expands Online Food Truck Map to More N.B. Cities
FREDERICTON – Ray Harris, owner of data strategy company Data Wazo, created an online food truck map showing where every food truck in Fredericton is, how long they’ll be there, what type of food they serve, and a photo of their menu. He expanded to include a Moncton map this week and Saint John is next on his list.
“The process to get the information is really manual. So, the plan is to do Saint John … and then really think about a better way to pull the data in,” Harris said.
“Halifax is on the roadmap, but when you get to a city of 500,000 that [manual data collection] is going to be harder to do.”
Harris attended UNB for Information Systems, a program that no longer exists there. It combined some computer science and business elements. While it didn’t have a particular emphasis on data, it was enough to get familiar with the concept.
Harris got interested in the ins and outs of data analysis before he even knew it himself, “running sports stats in Excel during breaks at work and whatnot, probably 10 or 11 years ago,” he said.
“But, I really saw the benefit of formalizing it and finding ways to share it within the last five years.”
Harris’ food truck map was inspired by his trip to Grimross Brewing where a breakfast food truck was broken down. He wanted to buy food from them, but when he returned a few times, the truck was gone.
“There’s got to be a better way than a bunch of different Facebook pages that people try to navigate to see where a certain truck is,” he said.
“So, I just thought I’d do something quick.”
The interactive map left people echoing a similar sentiment about food trucks, which is why Harris is working to get the program up and running for other cities.
But this isn’t the only thing Data Wazo does.
A lot of their clients are in Europe, Australia, and the United States, he says.
One of Harris’ Australian clients does sports facility consulting, going from one sports facility to another evaluating the infrastructure. Harris said their information database was more or less inaccessible. He’s worked with them for three years and the company now has rapid dashboards that bring back information they like.
“I love those ‘wow’ moments,” Harris said.
“When you actually show them [the company] the numbers in a certain way and they have this moment of, ‘oh my goodness.’”
Another recent project Data Wazo released was the New Brunswick hiking trails map. Each New Brunswick trail is listed with the location of the trail, what type of trail it is, what features are along the trail, and how long it is. The data used came from hikingnb.ca but Data Wazo used the data to create an interactive map with all of the information in one place.
Harris thinks if data analyzing is something you’re interested in, there are so many resources to help you jump in.
“The data is readily available,” he said.
“This is being democratized in a way where anyone can find anything they want and get to a point where they’re analyzing it.”