Getting started with CityRadar

Every business operating in Calgary needs a municipal licence, and the city publishes those licences — along with building and development permits — as open data. CityRadar reads that record every day, works out what changed, and turns each change into a dated signal: a business was licensed for the first time, a permit suggests one is fitting out, a licence lapsed. Where we can find them, we attach the business’s phone, email, website and social profiles, each labelled with where it came from and when we fetched it.

The intended reader is somebody who sells to new businesses — an insurance broker, a bookkeeper, a payroll or POS reseller, a signage shop. The product is the list and the evidence behind it. CityRadar does not send email for you, and it is not a CRM.

1. 1

   Open the city overview

   Calgary overview is the front door: how many businesses are licensed, what opened in the last 30 days, which categories and communities are moving, and the most recent signals.

2. 2

   Narrow to the businesses you sell to

   New businesses is the working list. Filter by category, community and how far back to look, or search by name. Two checkboxes change what is counted: numbered companies like 1234567 Alberta Ltd. (usually holding companies) and chain locations are both hidden by default, because neither is the local first-time buyer most people are prospecting for. Tick them to see everything.

   Prefer to work by event rather than by licence date? Signals filters the same data by what happened — opened, opening soon, closed — and by confidence.

3. 3

   Open one business and check the evidence

   A profile shows the licence record it came from, every signal detected for that business with the underlying evidence, the services that kind of business typically needs, and similar businesses nearby. If a claim on the page has no record behind it, it is not on the page.

4. 4

   Unlock the contact details

   Phone numbers and email addresses are hidden until you give us an email address once. That takes a few seconds, costs nothing while we are launching, and unlocks contacts across the whole site on that device — there is no account to create.

5. 5

   Take the list with you

   Export the filtered list to a spreadsheet (how export works), subscribe to the weekly email digest from any page’s Get alerts button, or connect an AI assistant directly to the data (connect Claude).