I am trying to synthesize my thoughts on the GeoWeb 2008 conference, as well as things that have been coming at us since the Safe Software press release. One of the thoughts that continues to rise to the surface is that the GeoWeb is not an independent section of the internet, but rather a niche location in the web; a niche section that perhaps is being rolled into its core.

I think I heard a similar statement from Ron Lake at the GeoWeb conference (”The GeoWeb is the Internet”). James Fee has picked up the theme in a recent post. The comments to that post seem to have echoes of the neogeography vs. GIS clashes. Yet, there does not appear to be any of the vitriol associated with this thread compared to past debates. Maybe we are moving past the divisions and into the realm of synergy between the different focuses of the groups.

And then bang, you see an announcement by ESRI and Microsoft Virtual Earth offering Virtual Earth products inside ArcGIS Server. Talk about a fusion of GIS and neogeography. You will have to purchase a Virtual Earth license, so it fits within Microsoft’s tradition licensing revenue model, but still, Virtual Earth is more about the future of yellow pages advertising than about GIS or GeoWeb services. At least according to Microsoft’s Vincent Tao at the Location Intelligence 2008 conference.

So where do we go from here? The internet is “evolving”. It started out as a robust means of communicating and sharing supercomputer resources (see ARPANET). It has become a ubiquitous communication, processing, and storage array that touches nearly every aspect of our daily lives. In its evolution to date, it has rolled through many businesses (e.g. telecommunication, financial, advertising, etc.), upending their business models, to create new services, products, and business opportunities. I think the spatial industry is just the next industry to overwhelmed (shaken? stirred? smashed?) by the evolution of this omnipresent technology in our lives.

Location awareness is just the next information stream to be absorbed by the massive data ingestion services that reside within the internet. If you own a mobile phone, your position on the planet is already trackable to within meters (see Enhanced 911). New business models are started daily on using these feeds as new Location-Based Services (LBS). As a consumer, geo-spam is a concern, but you can always turn-off the buzzer. But new models built on real-time crowd dynamics or “mobbing” offer a whole new approach to targeted marketing and advertising (see Peter Batty’s presentation at GeoWeb as an example).

Would you have seen this coming 10 years ago? It’s clear Microsoft did not see Google coming, and they had some very smart people trying to predict the future. I think we in the spatial data industry are facing the fertile grounds that lead to similar revolutionary technologies. Such environments lead to the classic innovator’s dilemma for business organizations - how do we maintain our current revenue stream, while creating new, faster growing opportunities so that we do not end up as the last maker of horse drawn carriages?

We have a packed week with presentations at GeoWeb, participation at OSCON, and a sponsorship at FOSCON. Our own Brian Artiaco will be competing in the FOSCON Live Coding Competition. I’ll try to keep blogging through GeoWeb, but if it happens it will be short and sweet.

(Image from Wikipedia)

I read with interest today that the B.C. Government’s deal with Google to turn over its entire geographic database to Google (see also the AnyThing Geo Blog). From the Vancouver Sun -

On Friday, Agriculture and Lands Minister Stan Hagen announced GeoBC, a government organization, will provide 24/7 access to the province’s geographic database in partnership with Google. This information will be available online at geobc.gov.bc.ca and from Google Earth.

This is a great opportunity for the government to disseminate its geo-content through another portal. The deal allows the BC government to follow its mission to best serve the public that originally paid for the geo-content.

However, if you review what is happening in Hollywood with respect to writers and actors demands for a greater share of the digital reviews from marketing their products through non-traditional portals, i.e. the Internet, I believe that there may be storm clouds on the horizons for geo-content producers.

For Google, it is a great way to get content with which to build the LBS business that will eventually sell advertising. Yet in its traditional business, Google pays referral fees to content providers for other types of content, such as blogs, using Adsense. It is unknown whether they are paying anything to the BC government, but the geo-content creators will receive nothing.

One could argue that the geo-content creators have already been paid. But this is the same argument used by the studios in the writers strike. I think that this may be a future issue for our field.

The facts of this partnership are well covered by the press release and Directions Magazine’s coverage (see Adena Schutzberg’s article and podcast). I thought I would give a bit more of the why.

1) ETL is fundamental to the needs of our customer base.
2) Safe is the best at spatial ETL.
3) People trust Safe for ETL.
4) If you use CAD or GIS software, there is a good chance you use Safe Software.

For a marketplace to be successful, its players have to trust their interactions and delivery mechanisms. Safe operates on over 200 different file formats across multiple platforms. Bringing this type of technology to our users is critical to our success; bringing Safe to our customers is just good sense.

What does Safe get out of this? We give them the cloud for FME Server and provide their users with the path to the future of web infrastructure.

Together, we get to focus on our strengths and bring new tools to bear on our respective businesses.

I am excited about our opportunities and the impacts I believe we will have on the spatial industry.

We use Amazon Web Services (AWS) quite a bit. Mostly we use the EC2 and S3, but recently we have been using a limited bit of Mechanical Turk (MTurk) for some testing of the web site.

For those of you who don’t know what MTurk is, from the web site -

…The Mechanical Turk web service enables companies to programmatically access this marketplace and a diverse, on-demand workforce. Developers can leverage this service to build human intelligence directly into their applications.

Our use has been somewhat limited to testing of the web site only. However, there has been some image processing uses of MTurk, including the SAR efforts to find Jim Gray and Steve Fossett.

I wear two hats these days. We are still actively involved in the development of HyperSpectral Imaging (HSI) sensors and algorithms (see the Florida Environmental Research Institute). It was from these efforts that we developed the cataloging, discovery, and distribution systems that we spun out into WeoGeo.

The holy grail of imaging techniques is the automatic extraction of features and classification of materials within the raster data. It is something we have been trying to develop for over a decade. There are others who have been working at it longer.

After all these years, there are some problems that are still difficult to solve in processing imagery. They frequently require just looking at the images frame by frame to resolve features and classify stuff that just defies algorithmic development. It strikes me that there may be some parts of this processing that may not be easily solved using computer algorithms. Things like finding seam lines in overlapping aerial photographs.

Several major imaging vendors send a chunk of their current image processing to low cost countries like China and India to complete their large-scale projects. It seems that there might be a better way to accomplish such geo-processing tasks that still require eyes then to incur the time and expense of sending these tasks overseas. Perhaps Mturk and some smart programming might offer a different approach.

I also wonder what other sort of QC/QA tasks in geo-processing might be solved by MTurk. I might try to kick it around a bit at GeoWeb. Find me if you got some thoughts.

(Ford assembly line, 1913)

Looks like a party is going to break out at GeoWeb (see links to Peter and James’ posts). I’ll be there for the sessions, and we’ll be showcasing WeoGeo during the Exhibitor Reception on Thursday 5:20 to 7:20 PM. Registration ends today.

Buy me for a beer and I’ll talk your ear off about monetizing your geo-knowledge. Buy me two and I promise not to say a word!

While not number 1, we at least made the top 10 of the Oregon Business Magazine’s Top 10 Coolest Start Ups.

(note - the cool guys in the image are not me.)

I know I have been silent for some time, but it has not been for lack of activity. I could not let this one pass without a quick post to let you know we are still cranking.

We have a bunch of exciting news coming up, including the news about the recent opening of our Portland office. Stay tuned.

How do you make a geospatial exchange a reality? You find great content providers to bring their wares to the market. Aerials Express (AEX) is one of those great content providers. With 420,000 square miles of high resolution aerial imagery over major metropolitan areas in the US (see map below), AEX brings base map content to “prime-the-pump” in the derivative product marketplace.

Christopher Warren and Bill Landis at AEX have been great. Their listings of AEX products address a big niche in our industry. High resolution imagery that can be physically acquired and manipulated with an explicit license to resell derivative works. Bill’s quote from the Press Release -

WeoGeo is an excellent opportunity for our company, said Bill Landis, President of Aerials Express. We are looking to WeoGeo’s advanced technology and unique distribution model to enhance the availability of our products into a wider range of GIS related markets.

It says a lot about the potential of an exchange-based market for our industry.

We will do our absolute best to make the market technology easy to use for search, discovery, and product acquisition. Its success will increase productivity and margins for all of its participants. Today, we mark its beginning.

There is a nice discussion happening on James Fee’s Blog about Web Mapping Systems and Services and the future of hosted mapping services. I was reading it and thought back to an interesting Wall Street Journal article on Monday about Circuit City that said same store sales in December fell by 12% in the US. While this news was depressing for the stock market, the silver lining for the geo-community was that navigational products were the only product line with increasing sales over the period.

Geo-devices are becoming more ubiquitous. The shear number of curious and talented people moving into our industry combined with these devices will drive product and service innovation in directions that may not be completely clear at the moment.

Converging with the mass market penetration of geo-devices and geo-content (geoware?) is the cloud computing efforts by AWS (and soon to be others). While the production of quality mapping today may require high end desktop workstations and servers, I think that Moore’s Law is eventually going to allow our field to produce geo-content and services far more easily, leading to a feedback into future product innovation. How we in the professional community create products and services today may be radically different in the future.

I offer this anecdote - today, after 10 years of running a Microsoft Exchange Server for our email requirements, we switched to Google Mail Premium. Over the 10 year period, we incurred costs of $10,000s, possibly greater than $100,000. These costs included licensing, hardware, server room, service personnel, etc. Our spam filter alone on the MSFT Exchange Server costs us $35 per year per mailbox. Our costs for Google Mail Premium service is $50 a mailbox per year. It is an easier to use, cheaper to implement, and offers more robust service than the Exchange product.

I think there might be parallels for our industry in this anecdote. It is probably a good exercise to be thinking about what products might be replacing the ones we are using today.

The future of GIS, geo-content, geo-entertainment, etc. will belong to those who can think outside of the traditional methods of production and product delivery. For historical evidence of the difference between companies that focus on the future and those that focus on their current narrow niche, look at the change in market capitalization of Trimble (TRMB) and Garmin (GRMN) over the last decade.

Above Chart taken from Google Finance

I am writing this in Seattle as we prepare for the finals of the Amazon Start-Up Challenge. We are truly excited to be a part of this Challenge. It is an amazing opportunity to be recognized for our technology and business model.

I am in love with our technology and how easy it makes it for all players, large and small, to participate in a global mapping market based on the quality of their skills and geo-content. WeoGeo will make it easy for all of us in the geospatial field to do our jobs, while at the same time increase our operating margins and productivity.

A really exciting part of this Challenge is that our business model is also being recognized by an internet service company with a $39 billion market capitalization. Everyone in our field has seen the explosion of interest in geospatial over the last few years. One only has to look at the >200 million downloads of Google Earth, as well as the consolidation by Tele Atlas and NavTeq to know that our industry is moving mainstream. This is excellent new for all of us, for it will provide more resources and revenues for our field, which translates into better opportunities for us all.

Come see the videos of the finalists in this Challenge and vote for your favorite (preferably WeoGeo!). But make sure you see our video. I hope the passion for what we are trying to accomplish is evident. I also hope that you will find what we are attempting to accomplish as exciting as we do.

Big thanks to Adena Schutzberg at All Points Blog and James Fee at Spatially Adjusted for helping us rock the vote!